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A wide-ranging analysis of the impact on European freedom and equality of the Great Recession of 2008.

A democratic regime is assumed to implement freedom and equality as the two critical and most important values. The question we intend to address here is: how and why has the actual implementation of freedom and equality been changing in the 1990–2020 period? Researching this topic, we cannot ignore the impact of the Great Recession since 2008. Thus, in this comparative research, we analyse France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom to detect the changes. As expected, the six largest European democracies have been differently affected by the crisis, as they also had different background factors. We address an additional question: what is the impact of the European Union on the two democratic values? Accordingly, we analyse economic inequality, social inequality, and ethnic inequality with the related changing trends and explanations. We also detect and analyse the trend of freedoms, and especially personal dignity, civil rights, and political rights. Thus, the relative decline of equalities and freedoms in the six countries emerge in the different complex facets. We also explore the demand for equalities and freedoms by citizens and the political commitments of party leaders. The other issues we address include how and why, respectively, equalities and freedoms are affected by domestic aspects and the role of external factors, especially the European Union. By connecting equalities and freedoms and drawing the lines of entire research, we show how there are three different paths in the future of democracy: balanced democracy, protest democracy, and unaccountable democracy.

A decade ago, Regions & Cohesion started with an editorial article by Harlan Koff and Carmen Maganda, who proposed launching "a multilingual (English, French, and Spanish) and interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of the human and environmental impacts of regional integration as well as governance processes."

This paper presents the mechanisms that lead from a democracy to democratic deterioration, crisis, conversion to a hybrid regime, and change to authoritarianism. For this purpose, processes related to the context of polarization, personalization and political radicalization are analyzed, which affect the qualities of democracy, leading to authoritarian regressions. The cases of Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey are analyzed. ; En este trabajo se presentan los mecanismos que llevan desde una democracia hacia el deterioro democrático, crisis, conversión en régimen híbrido, y cambio hacia el autoritarismo. Para ello, se analizan procesos vinculados con el contexto de polarización, personalización y radicalización política, que afectan las calidades de la democracia, dando lugar a regresiones autoritarias. Se analizan los casos de Polonia, Hungría, Venezuela y Turquía.

Chapter 1 Introduction -- Chapter 2 How Member States Cope with the Eurozone Crisis -- Chapter 3 Institutional inertia, ignorance and short-circuit: Cyprus -- Chapter 4 In the eye of the hurricane: Greece -- Chapter 5 Vincolo esterno or muddling through? Italy -- Chapter 6 Dissecting the exceptional case: Malta -- Chapter 7 Unstable preferences and policy changes: Spain -- Chapter 8 Challenges and opportunities under conditionality: Portugal

En este conjunto de trabajos, con el que se inaugura la Revista Euro Latinoamericana de estudios sociales y políticos, se cuenta con el aporte de estudiosos de distintos países de América Latina y Europa, a fin de precisar, desde enfoques de la ciencia política, la sociología y la historia, algunos de los problemas y alternativas de desarrollo que afrontan las democracias a ambos lados del atlántico. Un dossier de investigaciones como este puede presentarse de modo individual, comentando cada trabajo, o según las familias de problemas teóricos y de subtemáticas que se abordan. Partimos de esta segunda opción a fin de mostrar los puntos de confluencia, así como para reforzar el sentido que cada trabajo aporta a la discusión colectiva sobre las democracias y la política actual.

Comprising three volumes of contributions from expert authors from around the world, The SAGE Handbook of Political Science aims to frame, assess and synthesize research in the field, helping to define and identify its current and future developments.

"In the intellectual life of a scholar, it is not infrequent for a research question to rattle around in the back of the mind for years. Then all of a sudden comes the realisation that the time is ripe to tackle the topic, and that an attempt has to be made at presenting, discussing and empirically analysed it. I will not go into the reasons why I think that this is now the right moment to address the question on the implementation of the two traditional democratic values, and their transformations over recent years, partly as a consequence of the economic crisis, and its prospective sustainability. Maybe in his Discorsi Machiavelli was only right when he recommends going back to values in times of crisis. There are, of course, other objective and subjective reasons, and the former will emerge directly and indirectly in the first chapter"--

Comparison is an essential research method in political science. This book helps students to understand comparison as a scientific instrument, to grasp its necessity and its effective purpose for research. For that reason, it replies to three 'simple' questions: why compare, what to compare, and how to compare. The introduction distinguishes itself by considering not only the comparative tradition but also by taking methodological innovations of the last two decades into account.