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Rebuilding political legitimacy after civil war and state collapse is a challenging task. This paper looks at the role of the Parliament of Sierra Leone in this process. The analysis is concerned with two key areas: descriptive representation of the electorate to build inclusive politics, and elite reconciliation as a means of making democracy the only game in town. Based on data from a survey among Members of Parliament (MPs) and additional qualitative interviews, it will be shown that political representatives are predominantly male, elderly, and highly educated. Using Social Network Analysis, the paper will demonstrate that social similarities, family networks, and networks formed in educational institutions provide the social glue that form Sierra Leone's MPs into an interconnected national elite cutting across party alignments and ethnic origins. While elite integration is positive for democratization, the underrepresentation of women, youth, and the poor presents future challenges to political inclusion.

Research adopting an interdisciplinary, behavioural perspective on Public Policy and Public Administration is booming. Yet there has been little integration into mainstream public policy scholarship. Behavioural public administration (BPA) and behavioural public policy (BPP) have emerged largely as two disconnected subfields. We propose the overarching term ‘behavioural governance’ to refer to the cognitive and decision processes through which decision-makers, implementing actors and target populations shape and react to public policies and to each other, as well as the impacts of these processes on individual and group behaviour. To allow an integrative perspective, this introductory essay discusses how a behavioural perspective can deepen understanding of different phases of the policy process. We connect insights from a long established public policy and administration scholarship which has not always been self-defined as ‘behavioural’ with more recent studies adopting a more explicitly behavioural perspective, including those in this Special Issue from varied national contexts.

The recent growth of the secular population in the United States has implications for American politics. However, our understanding of these implications has been hindered by oversimplified concepts and measures that equate secularism with non-religion. We separate the two concepts, distinguishing “non-religiosity,” or the absence of religion, from “secularism,” or a positive embrace of secular beliefs and identities. Using original national-sample cross-sectional and panel surveys, we introduce new measures of secularism, evaluate their properties, and assess their connection to political attitudes and behavior. We find a clear distinction between secularism and non-religiosity in the American public and show that secularism is more closely related than non-religiosity to political attitudes, identifications, and engagement. In fact, while secularism is related to changes over time in political orientations, non-religiosity is not.

Recent studies hold that populist radical right parties have shifted towards a leftist socio-economic position in response to growing working-class support. Based on an analysis of policy choices in government, the present article examines this ‘pro-welfare view’ through a case study analysis of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Yet, despite the ‘proletarisation’ of its electoral support base, the FPÖ’s pro-welfare impact is restricted to the mitigation of welfare retrenchment for the core workforce, whereas the party has been a protagonist of tax cuts, trade union disempowerment and, more recently, welfare chauvinism. This policy impact can be attributed to a producerist ideology arguing that tax-paying ‘makers’ (employees, employers) need to be liberated from the economic burden imposed by self-serving ‘takers’ (immigrants, ‘corrupt elite’). The article concludes with conceptual and theoretical implications for the political economy of the populist radical right.

EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain countries face greater discrimination than others. Second, we analyse whether discrimination patterns vary between the general population and public administrators regarding attributes triggering discrimination and whether accountability prevents discrimination. In a pre-registered design, we conduct a population-based conjoint experiment in Germany including a sub-sample of public administrators. We find that (1) Dutch and fluent German speakers are preferred, i.e., positively discriminated, over Romanians and EU citizens with broken language skills, that (2) our way of holding people accountable was ineffective, and that (3) in all these regards discriminatory behaviour of public administrators is similar to behaviour of the general population.

Despite renewed interest in the role of business in shaping the welfare state, we still know little about how factions of capital adapt their strategies and translate these into political infighting and coalition building. Based on a detailed process tracing analysis of the political battle over German pension funds, this paper shows that cleavages within business do not necessarily run along the lines of finance vs. non-finance. While ‘financial challengers’ (banks and investment companies) advocated financialized pension funds, ‘financial incumbents’ (insurers) defended a conservative understanding of old age provision. Tremendous political momentum towards financialization notwithstanding, challengers remained largely unsuccessful. Incumbents elicited support from the wider business community by adjusting their strategic goals and engaging in discursive reformulations to effectively fight pension financialization from within capital. To accommodate such competition politics and coalition building, the paper argues for a more dynamic understanding of business strategizing and highlights the importance of discursive political strategies. It shows that some capitalists may act as antagonists of elements of financialization and problematizes the actual mechanisms of coalition building through which business plurality affects political outcomes.

Die Digitalisierung der OZG-Leistungen in den Digitallaboren zeigt einen Bedarf an neuen technologischen sowie überfachlichen Kompetenzen auf. Die Aneignung passiert vor allem in diesem Experimentierfeld. Der Beitrag identifiziert die notwendigen Digitalkompetenzen und macht Vorschläge zur Aufnahme in die Routinen der öffentlichen Verwaltung.

The coronavirus pandemic, which first impacted European societies in early 2020, has created a twofold crisis by combining a health threat with economic turmoil. While the crisis has affected all European societies very significantly, its impact varies across countries, social groups, and societal domains. In an effort to provide a first overview of the effect of the coronavirus crisis, in this editorial we discuss contributions of 58 papers published as part of this special issue. These early research papers illustrate the varied impact of the pandemic on various areas of social life. The first group of studies in this special issue analyzes the effect of the pandemic on social inequalities with respect to gender, ethnic otherness, education, and work. A second stream of research focuses on the psychological consequences of the pandemic, especially with respect to wellbeing and resilience. Thirdly, the crisis is discussed on a societal level, in regard to welfare states, social policies, and approaches to crisis governance. In a fourth line of inquiry, several studies have analyzed the impact of the pandemic on social solidarity and cohesion. A fifth strand of research is devoted to examining the role of culture and lifestyles. This review ends with a discussion of areas for future research trajectories.

The article investigates how international public administrations, as corporate actors, influence policymaking within international organizations. Starting from a conception of international organizations as political-administrative systems, we theorize the strategies international bureaucrats may use to affect international organizations’ policies and the conditions under which these strategies vary. Building on a most-likely case design, we use process tracing to study two cases of bureaucratic influence: the influence of the secretariat of the World Health Organization on the “Global action plan for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases”; and the influence of the International Labour Office on the “Resolution concerning decent work in global supply chains”. We use interview material gathered from international public administration staff and stakeholders to illustrate varying influence strategies and the conditions under which these strategies are used. The study shows how and when international public administrations exert policy influence, and offers new opportunities to extend the generalizability of public administration theories.

Construite sur le système administratif de la Société des Nations, l’Organisation des Nations unies (ONU) est devenue, depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale, un système important, complexe et à plusieurs niveaux, composé de plusieurs dizaines de bureaucraties internationales. En dehors d’une brève période dans les années 1980, et malgré la multiplication des études sur les administrations publiques internationales au cours des deux dernières décennies, il y a eu peu de publications dans la Revue internationale des sciences administratives (RISA) sur l’évolution du système des Nations unies et de ses nombreuses administrations publiques. Le numéro spécial intitulé « La bureaucratie internationale et le système des Nations unies » vise à encourager un regain d’intérêt de la part des chercheurs pour ce niveau mondial d’administration publique. Dans la présente introduction, nous expliquons en quoi l’étude des bureaucraties de l’ONU est importante du point de vue de l’administration publique, nous faisons le point sur la littérature pertinente et examinons la manière dont les sept articles contribuent à des avancées substantielles et méthodologiques clés dans l’étude des administrations du système de l’ONU.

Politicians' party membership allows voters to overcome incomplete information issues. In this article, we maintain that such ‘party cues’ in multilevel governance structures also induce voters to incorporate their assessment of incumbents at one level of government into their assessment of incumbents at other levels of government. Moreover, we argue that these assessment ‘spillovers’ increase in magnitude with voters' level of political information. They become particularly prominent for voters with higher levels of political knowledge and interest as well as during election periods (when information is less costly and more readily available). Empirical analyses using survey data from Germany covering the period 1990 to 2018 corroborate our theoretical propositions.

Low-carbon lifestyles are key to climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and keeping the Earth in a safe operating space. Understanding the global feasibility and drivers of low-carbon lifestyles requires large scale data covering various countries, demographic and socioeconomic groups. In this study, we use the audience segmentation data from Facebook's advertising platform to analyse the extent and drivers of interest in sustainable lifestyles, plant-based diets in particular, at a global level. We show that formal education level is the most important factor affecting vegetarianism interest, and it creates a sharper difference in low-income countries. Gender is a strong distinguishing factor, followed by national gross domestic product per capita and age. These findings enable upscaling local empirical studies to a global level with confidence for integrated assessments of low-carbon lifestyles. Future studies can expand this analysis of social media audience data to other consumption areas, such as household energy demand, and can also contribute to quantifying the psychosocial drivers of low-carbon lifestyles, such as personal and social norms.

How does the language of male and female politicians differ when they communicate directly with the public on social media? Do citizens address them differently? We apply Lasso logistic regression models to identify the linguistic features that most differentiate the language used by or addressed to male and female Spanish politicians. Male politicians use more words related to politics, sports, ideology and infrastructure, while female politicians talk about gender and social affairs. The choice of emojis varies greatly across genders. In a novel analysis of tweets written by citizens, we find evidence of gender-specific insults, and note that mentions of physical appearance and infantilising words are disproportionately found in text addressed to female politicians. The results suggest that politicians conform to gender stereotypes online and reveal ways in which citizens treat politicians differently depending on their gender.