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Does democracy make politicians accountable? And which role does information play in the accountability process? There are several reasons making the 2009 UK expenses scandal an ideal setting to answer these questions. Our study of the scandal reaches two main conclusions: 1) the removal of corrupt politicians happens mostly at the pre-election stage; 2) information availability is a crucial ingredient in the accountability process. We also show that punishment was directed to individual MPs rather than their parties and that voters displayed a substantial partisan bias, not only at the voting stage but also by perceiving copartisan MPs to be less involved in the scandal. Ceteris paribus, female MPs attracted more press coverage and, for the same amount of coverage, were more likely to stand down. Finally, we show that press coverage was ideologically balanced, i.e., newspapers with different ideological leaning devoted similar amount of news to each MP.

This article will examine whether the demands for social justice during the citizen-led assemblies ("plenums") in February 2014 in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) triggered electoral change in cantonal elections in the Bosniak-Croat entity (the Federation of BiH, or FBiH). Extant analyses underline the perennial weakness of Bosnian civil society, and the stasis in the ethnified political party system, even in the wake of the protests in 2014. However, these studies only look at the aggregate level and do not differentiate between places where plenums were established and those where they were not. To address this gap, the present article will differentiate, following Engin Isin, between "active citizenship" and "activist citizenship" as the basis for the conceptual framework. A difference-indifferences analysis will be employed using municipal-level FBiH cantonal election results from 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. There are two main questions in the study. First, was there a significant electoral change in municipalities with plenums compared with places without a plenum? Relatedly, did the change differ amongst the main parties? The article will thus link active and activist citizenship in the post-conflict and post-socialist setting of BiH.

It has long been recognized that the resilience of any system, whether human or natural, involves the capacity of that system to adapt its structure, although not necessarily function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. Thus over the long-term, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving the ability of a system to resist an immediate threat or recover to a stable, past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understandings of resilience. Instead a short-term, stable system perspective (STSS) on resilience is prevalent: our purpose here is to identify and problematize this perspective. In so doing, we present research that developed a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, this STSS perspective as it plays out within the context of UK infrastructure resilience. Thus, our goal is to help resilience practitioners better understand the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural and malicious threats.

Environmental activism across the Western Balkan successor states of the former Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, remains in its infancy. Compared to the movements of central and Eastern Europe, the development of environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) in these states appears to be much slower. From the empirical perspective of non-governmental organisation activity concerning river basin management in Herzegovina, the factors that have determined the pace and nature of environmental politics in the region are explored. The most significant constraints on ENGO activity relate specifically to the political legacy of conflict and the turbulent recent history of this region. The ethnicisation of party politics, the weak regulatory capacity of state authorities and the obfuscation of power, the specific model of political economy and the absence of green politics at the time of the collapse of socialism coalesce to inhibit the emergence of politically engaged and professionalised green advocacy networks.

Evidence is presented of how the Great Recession affected prioritisation of environmental protection. World Values Survey data from both before the recession's onset and its aftermath shows that increases in unemployment rates had significant, negative effects upon prioritisation of environmental protection while changing growth rates or gross domestic product (GDP) had none. These results hold not only among advanced industrial democracies, but also generalise to Latin American countries. Additionally, the findings offer no evidence that the recession changed the way in which individual wealth relates to the prioritisation of environmental protection. As a strong environmental public opinion is an important factor in the successful implementation of environmental policy, the findings suggest that, if policymakers wish to maintain public support for implementing environmental protection measures, they should prioritise low unemployment over economic growth.

On 1 December 2013, Croatia voted in a referendum on the constitutional definition of marriage. Whilst recent scholarship highlighted the symbolism nature of the referendum in domestic politics, its European dimension has not been reflected on. Using Leconte's notion of value-based Euroscepticism this article explores the role of European politics in the marriage referendum, using electoral data at the municipal level. As the analysis demonstrates that the referendum, at least partly, was a proactive attempt to halt the Europeanisation of same-sex marriage, the article also sheds light on local resistance to EU's homonationalist politics.