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This book proposes a simple framework for understanding the political economy of subsidy reform and applies it to four in-depth country studies covering more than 30 distinct episodes of reform. Five key lessons emerge. First, energy subsidies often follow a life cycle, beginning as a way to stabilize prices and reduce exposure to price volatility for low-income consumers. However, as they grow in size and political power, they become entrenched. Second, subsidy reform strategies vary because the underlying political economy problems vary. When benefits are concentrated, satisfying or isolating) interest groups with alternative policies is an important condition for effective reform. When benefits are diffuse, it can be much harder to identify and manage the political coalition needed for reform. Third, governments vary in their administrative and political capacities to implement difficult energy subsidy reforms. Fourth, improvements in social protection systems are often critical to the success of reforms because they make it possible to target assistance to those most in need. Finally, the most interesting cases involve governments that take a strategic approach to the challenges of political economy. In these settings, fixing energy subsidies is central to the governments' missions of retaining political power and reorganizing how the government delivers benefits to the population. These cases are examples of "reform engineering," where governments actively seek to create the capacity to implement alternative policies, depoliticize tariffs, and build credibility around alternative policies. The most successful reforms involve active efforts by policy leaders to identify the political forces supporting energy subsidies and redirect or inoculate them.

Digital water transformation is often written about as though universally desirable and inevitable, capable of addressing the multifaceted socioecological challenges that water systems face. However, there is not widespread reflection on the complexities, tensions and unintended consequences of digital transformation, its social and political dimensions are often neglected. This article introduces case studies of digital water development, bringing examples of technological innovation into dialogue with literature and empirical research from across the social sciences. We examine how Big Data affects our observations of water in society to shape water management, how the Internet of Things becomes involved in reproducing unjust water politics, how digital platforms are entangled in the varied sociocultural landscape of everyday water use, and how opensource technologies provide new possibilities for participatory water governance. We also reflect on regulatory developments and the possible trajectories of innovation resulting from public‐private sector interactions. A socially and politically informed view of digital water is essential for just and sustainable development, and the gap between industry visions of digital water and research within the social sciences is inhibitive. Thus, the analysis presented in this article provides a novel, pluralistic perspective on digital water development and outlines what is required for more inclusive future scholarship, policy and practice.

Shugart and Carey introduced the twin concepts of premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism in their 1992 volume, Presidents and Assemblies. Based on a meta-analysis of journal articles and book publications, this article distinguishes between an early and a contemporary history of the two concepts. The period of early history runs from 1992 to around 2009. This was the time when the two concepts were entering the academic consciousness and when there was also some typological and classificatory ambiguity. The period of contemporary history begins in 2010. This era is marked by conceptual and classificatory clarity and by an increasing reference to the two concepts in academic work. In the article, we show how the concepts have been applied over time, noting a number of changes across the two periods under consideration. We conclude by pointing out some challenges to the future application of the two concepts.

This themed section takes as its starting point the premise that the body matters in International Political Economy (IPE) and presents four original articles that support and illustrate this ontologically critical and, perhaps, provocative position. Although feminist scholarship has undoubtedly gained a place at the table in IPE, it is curious that one of the most important concerns, and contributions, of feminist IPE-that global capitalism is marked upon, and forged through, bodies-has not emerged as a major preoccupation for the discipline more broadly. In what follows we present what we believe is a strong corrective to that inattention and, in so doing, we hope to begin to set out an exploratory agenda for the body to be both foundational and fundamental to contemporary IPE. Adapted from the source document.

The article outlines the role and significance of the myth in the modern world, the nature of the political mythological image. According to the author, the key political myths in the modern world are: freedom, democracy, globalization. It is noted that the nature of the political mythological image is dialectical: it is universal, because the myth is focused on the search for a common, unified, deep-objective ontological basis, and at the same time is unique, due to the filling of the image with meanings and meanings, born by the originality of the political life of certain civilizations and national cultures.

Given the nature of the decision-making process in modern institutions, those concerned with normative questions must sharpen these questions. And they must learn to express them in terms which will be meaningful to those concerned with the technical aspects of the policy and planning process and also to the experienced concerns of the polity. This translation of ethical questions into political form requires that ethics take its place in the dialogue which already is going on in the disciplines of the social sciences. The task for ethics in this conversation is to be able to maintain its own integrity—its own agenda—without falling victim to the illusion that integrity means autonomy.

In response to growing demographic diversity, European countries have selectively implemented political multiculturalism, a set of policies that seek to redefine prevailing conceptions of national identity. We explore the consequences of such policies for mass political support. Applying multi-level modeling to the 2002 and 2010 waves of the European Social Survey and analyzing multiple dependent variables including trust in regime institutions and assessments of the government of the day and the political system's performance, we show that the extensive adoption of multicultural policies magnifies the degree to which hostility to immigration is negatively associated with political support. This finding, robust to multiple specifications, is corroborated using European Values Survey data. It underscores how policies that challenge citizens' conceptions of national identity strengthen the link between opposition to immigration and political discontent, furnishing ongoing opportunities for rightist fringe parties to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment among the politically alienated.

International relations play a vital role in modern politics. They differ from any other relations by several features: spontaneity, lack of a single core of power and the center for making centralized decisions, coverage of all spheres of life of the participants involved in the process and the increasing influence of subjective factors. The scale that embraces international relations differs in «verticals» and «contours». They include global, regional and specific relationships, as well as group and bilateral relations.China and Russia are connected by centuries-old history. Russian-Chinese relations and their dynamic development are of interest to the political science community. At present, they form an important material basis for cooperation in the areas of trade and economy, contributing to the development of the Russian economy.China supports and subsidizes projects that ensure its interests in Russia. Political and economic cooperation between Russia and China is developing actively and is using more and more resources. The more important it becomes to maintain good-neighbor and productive relations. Russian-Chinese relations affect many spheres of life of the two States: scientific, economic, military, cultural, etc.in this light, economic cooperation stands out as one of the main. Russian-Chinese trade and economic cooperation is actively analyzed in the works of many researchers, but there is no consensus on the most important vectors of cooperation and prospects for its development. In this regard, the analysis and structuring of some areas of Russian-Chinese relations, foreign economic relations, opportunities for the development of relations between Russia and China, as well as their transition to a new level are becoming urgent.China is the largest trade partner of Russia and an investor who is interested in promoting some projects implemented in Russia. For this reason, the development of successful and fruitful relations is in the first place among the leaders of the two powers. The need for multidirectional trade and economic relations is also conditioned by geopolitical, cultural and historical factors.

The topic of the Holocaust is a relatively new issue in Lithuanian historical education – only with the regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990 did Lithuanians have a chance include the Holocaust theme into the main school curriculum. Of course, its development through the first two decades have not been steady and even – in the beginning of the creation of the new educational system the Holocaust did not receive so much attention as in later years with the relation to integration with the European Union (2004) and development of historical studies on the Holocaust within the Lithuanian academic community. This article aims to analyse the representation of the Holocaust in Lithuanian educational system during the first two decades after Lithuania regained its independence. So the main basis of empirical data will be all history textbooks for Lithuanian school education (from the 5th grade to the last, 12th grade) published in the period of 1992-2012, and educational programmes presented by the State`s Ministry of Education and Science. In order to objectively evaluate the Lithuanian situation regarding Holocaust education the article will discuss and compare the main trends of Holocaust education development in neighbouring countries, which also suffered from Holocaust and could not freely speak about the issue during the Communist regime.