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Overall, these findings indicate that confidence in representative and confidence in regulative institutions and authorities establish two qualitatively different types of political confidence, each with distinct implications for the functioning and well-being of modern democracies.

This book explores key contemporary issues of democracy in our globalized and highly technologized world. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, with contributions including the fields of philosophy, political science, media studies, linguistics, and aesthetics, it reflects on the characteristics of the democratic state and democratic social practices.The book features contributions on topics such as the status of political parties, the separation of powers and the rule of law, bureaucracy and meritocracy, equality, forms of democratic participation and governance, comparisons between historical and contemporary democratic practices, individual rights, propaganda, political engagement, and consent. Further, it discusses how global information flows and new technologies affect democratic processes, including topics such as cyber-activism and open-source software as a means of empowerment to ethnocentric and class-centric technological design, globalization and media neutrality, and the mechanization of public administration. Overall, the book demonstrates how historical, philosophical, technical, and institutional issues relate to contemporary democracy. It will appeal to political theorists, social scientists and everybody interested in contemporary democracy.

This book aims to present a coherent picture of Germany's European policy during Merkel's chancellorship. At the same time, it traces the development of the EU in the period 2005-2021. Accordingly, the European crises and the internal and external threats to the integration community are addressed, as well as the jointly developed solutions. Thus, on the one hand, the book shows what Germany was willing to do for Europe; on the other, it reveals how the EU was able to develop further as the most important point of reference for German politics and power.

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization - whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers' institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs.This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective. 

This book discusses whether democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary, or contradicting ideas. The rediscovery of classic republicanism a few decades ago made it clear how profoundly modern notions of democracy had been shaped by the republican tradition. But defining these two concepts remains difficult, and the views diverge widely. The overarching aim of this book is to discuss the extent to which democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary or mutually contradicting ideals / ideas. Pursuing this open approach to the subject means calling into question a widely used formula according to which modern democracy is composed of liberal principles such as individualism, the rule of law and human rights, on the one hand, and of republican principles such as focusing on the common good and popular sovereignty, on the other. This book will appeal to students, researches, and scholars of political science interested in a better understanding of political theory and political history.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the alterations and problems caused by new technologies in all fields of politics. It further examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the nexus between politics, economics, and law. The book raises and answers several important questions: What is the role of AI in politics? Are people prepared for the challenges presented by technical developments? How will Al affect future politics and human society?  How can politics and law deal with Al''s disruptive technologies? What impact will AI and technology have on law? How can efficient cooperation between human beings and AI be shaped?  Can artificial intelligence automate public decision-making?Topics discussed in the book include, but are not limited to digital governance, public administration, digital economy, corruption, democracy and voting, legal singularity, separation of power, constitutional rights, GDPR in politics, AI personhood, digital politics, cyberspace sovereignty, cyberspace transactions, and human rights. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of political science, law, and economics, as well as policy-makers and practitioners, interested in a better understanding of political, legal, and economic aspects and issues of AI. 

The book represents original research in a field of study rarely pursued while analysing the intellectual dimensions of disputes over ethically sensitive issues that occur in European Union politics.

This book examines gender- and integration-specific needs of women migrants by using a unique analytic framework, covering both qualitative and quantitative methods and techniques.

This book examines women's political communication in Africa, capturing previously unheard women's voices, and presenting detailed information on overlooked communication strategies and forms of power relations employed by African women and women of African descent.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of EU support between 2006 and 2015, and of electoral behavior during the European Parliament elections.

This book offers an in-depth case study on the leading international refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and its approach to environmentally displaced persons.

Does authoritarian rule benefit from political repression? Secondly, empirical data supports complementarity only as long as political repression preempts political opposition. Lastly, despite its conceptual centrality, political repression has little influence on the outcomes of authoritarian politics.

This book examines women's political communication in Africa, capturing previously unheard women's voices, and presenting detailed information on overlooked communication strategies and forms of power relations employed by African women and women of African descent.

It presents a framework for critical policy analysis that draws on cultural political economy and explores its potential synergies with complementary approaches such as historical materialist policy analysis and critical discourse analysis.

By studying outer space as a physical and socio-economic space as well as a military-diplomatic area, the author helps readers understand outer space as a geopolitical environment.

This book examines the UK prime minister's political leadership in the domestic executive.

This book examines how social cleavage lines shape issue voting and party competition. Based on a study of German elections between 1980 and 1994, it analyzes whether cleavage group members put more weight on policies that address their personal self-interest than voters who are not affected by the cleavage line.

Based on a case study of Switzerland, it analyses how cleavages divide voters into voting blocs and how this influences Swiss voting behaviour and the Swiss party system. Behavioural changes among voters and changes in the size of social groups are explored as explanatory factors for the decline of cleavage voting.

This book explores the impact on EU member states of intensified European cooperation in the field of vocational education and training. The book maintains that European instruments such as the European Qualifications Framework and the European Credit System for Vocational Education and Training are indeed biased towards liberal training regimes.

This book analyzes the link between economic and political inequalities and investigates the mechanisms that lead to economically rooted inequalities in the political representation of citizens' policy preferences.

This book analyzes the individual and contextual determinants of protest politics in Western Europe. Building on different theoretical perspectives, from social movements theory to political behavior approaches, the author provides new empirical evidence on the patterns of protest politics.

This book examines democratizing media reforms in Latin America. By offering a civil society perspective, the author moves beyond conventional accounts that perceive media reforms primarily as a form of government repression to punish oppositional media.

This book offers a framework for the analysis of political communication in election campaigns based on digital trace data that documents political behavior, interests and opinions.

The books demonstrates that shifts in Soviet policy towards the GDR stemmed, on the one hand, from the international level, in that Soviet security was legitimated by the existence of two full-fledged German states, and, on the other, may be best explained in terms of ideas and Gorbachev's new political philosophy.

This book analyses judicial reforms in five countries of South-East Europe, focusing on two factors influencing the outcome of reforms: the role of the European Union in light of the pre-accession process and the legacies of past communist regimes.

This book explores the multilayer nexus among inter-related international and regional security parameters that critically define the EU's rapidly changing security environment.