Scholars examining the effects of collective action on public policy have predominantly analyzed policy outcomes with respect to the stated goals of collective actors. This approach to the political influence of collective action not only limits our analytical scope, but also makes the field vulnerable to the criticism that outcome research may be overly deterministic in attributing observed changes to collective action, especially if it utilizes an atemporal logic. This article offers an alternative approach by analyzing a change in legislation that can be considered an unintended consequence of collective action. It examines the decision to introduce a police identification statute after the violent NoG20 protests in Hamburg in 2017 and asks how the protests were consequential for a policy that collective actors had neither initially addressed, nor intended to change. Policy making is conceptualized as a contingent, non-linear process that is best understood from a perspective. Based on parliamentary documents and semi-structured interviews, the article temporally reconstructs a policy process that had its beginning well before the NoG20 protests. The long-term analysis shows that instead of initiating policy change, the protests created a window of opportunity for the members of parliament to push for a proposal they had previously introduced. Police identification was raised after multiple, contingent processes converged after the protests that enabled the members of parliament to point to a factual necessity for policy change. Activists only had a passive role in this change as they had lost credibility during the violent protests. This study emphasizes the centrality of temporality for understanding policy effects of collective action and argues that a processual perspective allows for contextualizing the influence of collective actors both in time and in concert with other actors.

The article considers the long-standing limits of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) through the lenses of Next Generation EU (NGEU) pandemic response evidencing how Covid-19 exacerbated EMU shortcomings are (not) overcome. We evaluate whether NGEU is only a palliative stop-gap fix to structural problems and how for Covid-19 to be considered as a breaking point for EU economic governance permanent ambitious (Treaty) reform is an essential and so far not uncontested step. A qualitative systematic review of weaknesses of EMU and proposed reforms informs a scoreboard evaluation of NGEU. Results confirm that while the symmetric crisis allowed suspending risk-sharing and solidarity vetoes, deep structural asymmetries and unfitness of (intergovernmental) decision-making cannot be addressed through NGEU temporary emergency mechanism. Hence Covid-19 so far cannot be narrated as sparking a revolutionary deviation from the architecture and guiding principle of the supranational fiscal framework. At the same time, the pandemic opened a (short-lived) window of opportunity for completing the EMU, requiring permanent structural institutional (Treaty) reform. A timely finding – grounded in copious extant literature on the EMU – highlighting the high stakes of the ongoing Conference of the future of Europe, whose success can only materialise through an ambitious (federal) agenda.

This article examines how protesters produce new tactics by focusing specifically on Hirak Al-Rif, a protest movement which took place in Morocco in 2016–2017. Drawing on several sources (e.g. semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations, live-streamed Facebook videos, and digital traces), the article shows how new tactics can derive routine activities and, by focusing on the role of newcomers, suggests to go beyond a strictly top-down model of mobilisations. Newcomers relied on everyday routines at the neighbourhood level and amplified the dynamic of protests in a way that went beyond the initial expectations of core activists. Tactical innovations can thus be fostered through pressures and reappropriations enacted from below, which bind core activists to the wider base of the movement through moral obligations. Biographical experiences, prior bonds, and the individuals' positions in the mobilisation networks also prove to be relevant matters in the plural and contingent making of tactical innovations.

This article seeks to contribute to the analyses of the impact of the Covid-19 on the global political economy. It does so through a qualitative content analysis of the key policy documents published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the outbreak of the pandemic crisis. The IMF has been, historically, one of the main designers of international macroeconomic governance. The paper focuses on fiscal policy, which retains a central place in the strategy of the IMF to deal with the pandemic and especially for the post-pandemic recovery phase. The analysis of the documents of the IMF contributes (i) to appreciate the interpretation of the nature of the pandemic crisis through the lenses of a prominent international financial institution, (ii) to explore the policy strategy outlined to deal with the pandemic emergency, (iii) to assess possible changes at the level of policy, and accordingly, future directions in global political economy. Evidence suggests that fiscal stimulus, public investment and planning will likely have a prominent position in the future directions of the IMF policy advice.

The relationship between the European radical left and democracy has come into attention due to the electoral surges of some such parties and their participation in government. Its scrutiny, however, remains ambivalent, at a time contemporary democracies are experiencing historic disruptions affecting how people engage with parties. This study offers an organisational perspective of the European radical left in order to map out and elaborate on patterns of democratic practice in this party family, as measured against a broadly liberal benchmark. Using a modified version of the internal party democracy (IPD) index developed by Rahat and Shapira (2017), the study compares fifteen parliamentary radical left parties (RLPs) from eleven European countries – Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain – across the dimensions of participation, representation, competition, responsiveness and transparency. Specifically, the study outlines patterns across the IPD dimensions and investigates the extent of variation within the party family, juxtaposing it against ideological and structural distinctions among RLPs.

The article focuses on Italians' reactions to the pandemic on Twitter. During the first phase of the 2020 lockdown (from the beginning of March 2020 - to the beginning of May 2020), a real-time dataset was built, linking data scratching to three events related to the introduction of the Prime Minister's decrees and his press conferences. The chosen observation point is Twitter, platform that allows us to monitor the emergence of discussions on public issues, extremely synchronized with events and news – which is, moreover, a feature of use of this platform. The coronavirus hashtag was chosen as a mechanism to track the development of Italian reactions, following the evolution of its sense and sensemaking and considering it as a polysemic collector. The aim is to identify within the tweets the actors, the topics, and the tone of the debate in an open public space. Furthermore, the analysis is carried out in search of the Italians' perception of the lockdown and whether they are in favor of it because of the defense of public health or they see it as a restriction of their individual freedom. The analysis, which used the socio-constructivist approach of Emotional Text Mining, reveals two explanatory-dimensions in the governance of the crisis: lockdown and breakdown and allows us to understand the reasons for Twitter's instinct-reactions.

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This paper explores the complex relationship between media and political systems in the context of the International News Flow, regarding the interdisciplinary research area between media study and International Relations. The focus is on International News Flow interactions and effects upon democratic political systems. The aim is to fill the gap concerning international relations in comparative media analysis literature. Despite using Hallin and Mancini's framework (2004, 2012), the present research does not only apply their typology to test its validity, but it also applies the main International Relations theoretical frameworks that deepen the relationship between media and political systems to shed light on the degree of superimposition between structure-based and content-based frameworks of media systems. The case study is the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey. In particular, in terms of coverage and analysis, the study considers how the newspapers of four countries (Italy, France, Germany and England), which represent the three democracy models of Hallini and Mancini – Mediterranean, Liberal, Corporative plus one that cuts across different models – framed the failed coup attempt in the days following the beginning of the crisis.

This book review has been written during the COVID19 pandemic.The book was published in 2019, when the city of Milan was experiencing a moment of economic and demographic growth.This review describes the contents of the book at the moment of its publication, as many of its chapters rely on long-standing governmental processes enacted in various policy fields.Accurate data (or forecasts) on the effects of Coronavirus crisis in the city of Milan are currently lacking and do not allow one to trace new possible trends.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative news downplayed the threat of the virus. Perceived risks of COVID-19 are an important factor in influencing citizens' willingness to comply with risk prevention measures. An online survey (N=269) of U.S. residents was conducted March 30 - April 1, 2020. We found that those who used partisan conservative news sources as their primary source of information about the virus were significantly less likely to view it as a threat, compared to those who cited Far Left, Center Left, and Center Right news sources. Politically conservative Far Right news audiences reported significantly lower estimates of their own COVID-19 risk, as well as that of their age group peers, the average person in the U.S., and the average senior citizen in the U.S.