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The Effect of Populist Incumbents on Democracy
No full textPopulism’s effects on democracy after populists gain control of government (hereafter, populist incumbents) are some of the best theorized and documented consequences. The argument that populist incumbents threaten institutions of democratic contestation—and, less frequently, that they correct some aspects of political participation and representation—has been made from multiple approaches.1 Scholars and commentators often cite specific cases of populists harming democracy and, since 2016, several large-N studies have confirmed their negative impact. Specifically, studies repeatedly show the harmful effects of populist incumbents on civil liberties, including media freedom, horizontal accountability, and electoral integrity in both electoral and liberal democracies. Research has been less consistent in showing the positive consequences of populist incumbents, especially for democratic representation and political participation
Rising inequality:A material perspective on the Great Recession in the European Union
No full textThe 2007/8 economic crisis and the global Great Recession led to widespread turmoil and instability. In Europe, unprecedented reductions in per capita resource use were crisis-driven rather than the result of deliberate policies. This study examines material use patterns in the EU-27 from 2000 to 2020, covering the period before and the onset of the Great Recession. We find that average material consumption in Europe decreased and has since stagnated, although this trend is uneven, with growing underlying inequalities, as measured using the Theil index of metabolic rates. The patterns in construction materials especially shape overall resource use trajectories. The role of infrastructure and services provisioning, especially where these are fossil-fueled, emerges as key in understanding these patterns. Geographic groupings of EU member states—Northern, Eastern, Mediterranean, and Central—further explain the inequalities that deepened following the recession. These emerging disparities raise important questions about what underpins the European project in a Union in which growth or sustained wealth in some member states systematically coincides with what can only be described as collapse elsewhere
How language, culture, and geography shape online dialogue:Insights from Koo
No full textFounded in India in 2020, the microblogging site ‘Koo’ launched as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms, with the explicit aim of catering to non-Western communities in their vernacular languages, and capitalising on a period of tension between the Indian government and Twitter which led many users to seek Twitter-alternatives. Drawing on a near-complete dataset totalling over 71M posts and 399M user interactions, we show how Koo attracted users from several countries including India, Nigeria and Brazil, but with variable levels of sustained user engagement. We highlight how Koo’s interaction network was shaped by multiple country-specific migrations displaying strong divides between linguistic and cultural communities, for instance, with English-speaking communities from India and Nigeria largely isolated from one another. Finally, we analyse the content shared by different linguistic communities and identify cultural patterns which, we speculate, promoted similar discourses across language groups. Our results show that for language groups of similar sizes, Indian languages fostered higher discourse diversity than non-Indian languages, possibly highlighting synergistic effects which boosted the uptake and retention of these groups. Despite this, Koo failed to capitalise on this synergy and ceased operations in July 2024. With this context, our study points to some of the possible reasons why the multilingual and politically diverse platform Koo struggled to remain sustainable, failing to stave off competition from its US-based competitors, despite its commitment to cultivating support for the different vernacular communities of Indian social media users
