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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.