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This article presents a new and previously unchartered dataset on roll call votes for all 28 member states in the Council of the EU between 2010 and 2019 and studies the effects of politicisation on governments' oppositional voting in the different policy areas. We contribute to the literature with two main findings. First, our study provides strong evidence for bottom-up politicisation, where Euroscepticism and the left-right positions of national political parties strongly affect governments' voting in the Council. Second, we provide new evidence for a form of differentiated politicisation where ideological standpoints of political parties in government and opposition have different effects on oppositional voting in the various policy areas.

Scholarly literature has demonstrated that hybridity transforms both legacy and new media, but that this change is not even. We treat social media platforms as arenas of remediation, where users share and add their own context to information produced by both media subtypes and compare social media conversations about migration in six European languages that include links to either traditional or new media during 2015–2019. We use a mix of computational and statistical methods to analyze 3.5 million (re)tweets and 500,000 links shared within them. We identify the main differences in agenda setting power, function, and tone present within tweets that include links to legacy or new media. Our results show that discourses are similar across languages but clearly different when remediating legacy and new media. Trust in legacy media is correlated with higher proportion of shared links from legacy media and reversely related to the proportion of shared links from new media sources. Considering the volume and timing of the remediated content, we conclude that legacy media retains its agenda setting power. New media linked content tends to cover migration in association to subjects such as Islam or terrorism and to express strong critical opinions against migrants/refugees. The language used is more toxic than in legacy media linked content. The tweets remediating legacy media articles covered topics like domestic or European politics, causes of refugee arrivals and procedures to give them protection. Thus, legacy and new media remediated content differs in both tone and function: toxicity is low and factuality high for content linking to legacy media, with the reverse being true for new media remediations.

So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relationship between environmental attitudes and actual `green' actions, something known as the attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely, when other factors would be more effective. This paper presents an online experiment with real money at stake and real-world consequences designed to test the effect of environmental attitudes on behavior under various conditions. We found that environmental attitudes affected behavior only in low-cost situations. This finding is consistent with the low-cost hypothesis of environmental behavior postulating that concerned individuals will undertake low-cost actions in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance between their attitudes and rational realization of the environmental impact of their behavior but avoid higher-cost actions despite their greater potential as far as environmental protection. This finding has important consequences for the design of more effective climate policies in a democratic context as it puts limits on what can be achieved by raising environmental concern alone.

We present an analysis of regulatory activities in historical commons offering a unique picture of their long-term institutional dynamics. The analysis took into account almost 3,800 regulatory activities in eighteen European commons in two countries across seven centuries. Despite differences in time and space, we found a shared pattern where an initial, highly-dynamic institutional-definition phase was followed by a relatively long period of stability and a final burst of activities, possibly in an attempt to respond to new challenges. In addition, most of the initial regulatory activities focused on resource use, while towards the end other activities prevailed. Our approach allows for a better understanding of institutional dynamics and our findings also provide important insights about how to regulate the use of current natural resources.

Historical commons represent self-governed governance regimes that regulate the use and management of natural and man-made shared resources. Despite growing scientific interests, analyses of commons evolution and temporal dynamics are rare and drivers of change (birth, adaptation, dissolution) remain obscure. We apply an interdisciplinary approach and address these issues from an eco-evolutionary perspective. Analyses of > 400 Dutch commons over more than a millennium (between the 9th and the 20th century) uncovered that most commons originated between 1200 and 1700, and that there was a particularly high rate of evolution during 1300–1550, a pattern intermediate to gradualism and punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. Dissolutions of commons were rare prior to 1800 and peaked around 1850, comparable to a mass extinction in biology. Temporal trends in number, spatial distribution, density, and dispersion of historical commons were distinctive and resembled developments seen at the levels of species and individuals in the growth of biological communities and populations, in that they showed signs of saturation determined by the abundance and distribution of resources. The spatiotemporal dynamics of commons also pointed to important roles of social, economic and political factors, such as new reclamations of resources and pressure on resources due to population growth. Despite internal and external pressures, the self-governing commons studied here were very successful, in the sense that they persisted for on average >350 years. There was a weak positive relationship between the use of multiple resources and the lifespan of commons, resembling associations between diversity and persistence seen in biological systems. It is argued that eco-evolutionary perspectives can further the understanding of the long-term dynamics of commons as institutions for collective action, vitalize future research, improve management of shared goods, and advise about sustainable utilization of finite resources.

In their studies of collective exploitation of common-pool resources, Ostrom and other scholars have stressed the importance of sanctioning as an essential method for preventing overuse and, eventually, the collapse of commons. However, most of the available evidence is based on data covering a relatively small period in history, and thus does not inform us about the evolution of rules, including sanctions, over time. In this article, we demonstrate, based on historical sources covering several centuries, that sanctioning was not always the preferred way of preventing or dealing with free-riding in institutions for collective action, but that the legal context is decisive to understand why commoners in some countries were using more sanctions than those in others to regulate commoners' behavior. Commoners that could self-govern their resources used fewer sanctions, and when they did, it was mainly to avoid overuse of their most vulnerable resources. Moreover, graduated sanctioning seems to be less important than suggested in Ostrom's famous Design Principles, and was reserved primarily for immediate threats to the commons' resources. We also show the importance of other types of rules, such as differentiated rules, which have hardly been taken into account in literature to date.

In their studies of collective exploitation of common-pool resources, Ostrom and other scholars have stressed the importance of sanctioning as an essential method for preventing overuse and, eventually, the collapse of commons. However, most of the available evidence is based on data covering a relatively small period in history, and thus does not inform us about the evolution of rules, including sanctions, over time. In this article, we demonstrate, based on historical sources covering several centuries, that sanctioning was not always the preferred way of preventing or dealing with free-riding in institutions for collective action, but that the legal context is decisive to understand why commoners in some countries were using more sanctions than those in others to regulate commoners' behavior. Commoners that could self-govern their resources used fewer sanctions, and when they did, it was mainly to avoid overuse of their most vulnerable resources. Moreover, graduated sanctioning seems to be less important than suggested in Ostrom's famous Design Principles, and was reserved primarily for immediate threats to the commons' resources. We also show the importance of other types of rules, such as differentiated rules, which have hardly been taken into account in literature to date.