Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft最新文献

The governments' mitigation measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in our post-war history. For overcoming this crisis, citizens were expected to act in compliance with these measures in order to control the spread of the virus and keep public health systems functional. This call for protecting the public health at the same time confronted citizens with several and severe limitations of their democratic freedoms and rights: confinement, restriction on freedoms of movement, religion, specific provisions for public protest and finally also limitations to the right of education by school closures. This paper analyzes how citizens perceive the threat the COVID-19 pandemic and especially the mitigation measures posed for democracy. We assume that pandemic waves and pandemic fatigue have an impact on the perception of threat. To see the overall societal picture, we exploit a large-scale archive of online discourse on Twitter out of which we extract democracy-related discourse with the same temporal and geospatial coverage for our investigation. From that data source, we apply computational methods to extract time series data reflecting aggregated opinions and their evolution over time concerned with the correlation of attitudes towards democracy. We them move deeper using a longitudinal panel survey we conducted in November/December 2020, March/April 2021, and July/August 2021. to have a view of the relationship between citizens' socio-economic status and basic political attitudes. Our multi-method analysis bases on the German case and covers the period from December 2020 to August 2021.

Tunisia's political system suffers from recurrent problems with governability and proportionality. A volatile party landscape, frequent cabinet reshuffles, and political gridlocks repeatedly jeopardized stability and democratic progress since the Arab Spring. Major and minor electoral reforms were undertaken in 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2022, but they were unable to diffuse either of these issues. This analysis is therefore driven by two central questions: How have Tunisia's electoral laws changed since the Arab Spring? And why have these reforms failed to improve both governability and proportionality? It will be argued that because Tunisia's party landscape is fractured and volatile only on the secularist side of the spectrum, coalitions with and against Ennahda are costly to all parties involved, worsening the overall quality of political representation. By analyzing the trajectory of major and minor electoral reforms longitudinally, this paper finds that Tunisia's electoral reforms incrementally restricted the electoral system by limiting parties' and candidates' capacity to compete in elections. Through modifying legislation on campaign finance and subsidies, gender parity, and candidacy requirements, and finally abolishing Tunisia's closed list PR-system in 2022, reforms benefit established older parties and wealthier candidates while fortifying the electoral system against newer and less wealthy contenders. Tunisia's electoral reforms are inadequate in addressing governability and proportionality because restricting electoral competition alone cannot improve the quality of representation through political parties.

This study examines how populist radical right parties (PRRP) adapt to the discursive opportunities delivered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Conducting manual content analyses of discourses on Twitter in six Western European countries between February and October 2020 we show that PRRP frame the pandemic as a domestic political crisis attacking primarily national political elites. While PRRP occasionally link their initial support for measures against the pandemic to blame attribution towards immigrants accusing them of spreading the virus, nativist messages almost disappear when PRRP became less supportive of restrictions. Instead, in countries less affected by the pandemic (Austria, Germany) as well as in Spain, PRRP compensate the lack of nativist messages by using anti-elitist demonizing discourses against the national government accusing it of abolishing democracy and undermining freedom. The study shows how PRRP electorally "survive" periods with scarce nativist discursive opportunities by emphasizing on anti-elitist discourses.

Supplementary information: The online version of this article (10.1007/s12286-022-00540-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The aim of this article is to analyse the dysfunctionalities of Polish democracy that has seen the stability of the power-opposition system disturbed; and society left suffering under the totality of political polarisation. Considering the fact that within a polarised society only one solution can be the leading one, the society and the state, both internally and externally, have become extremely divided, which has not only impacted Polish society's image of itself, but also Poland's standing and relations on the international stage. The observed phenomena can be traced to multiple events that started years before Poland became beset by a crisis of democracy. This article will analyse political and legal changes in Poland within the democratic frames, which no longer fulfil the previously assigned tasks. It will also make a connection between affective political polarisation and dysfunctions of democracy that might lead to a worsening of the stability of the democratic system. Finally, it will show the consequences of the country's dysfunctionality on both national and international stages.