Julia Leininger

Climate action is shaped as much by politics as by technology and economics. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), central to mitigation and adaptation assessments, do not yet include a quantitative representation of political development. We outline a research agenda to systematically integrate political dimensions into climate scenario modelling.

International democracy promotion1 is in upheaval. Its decline began slowly, with a growing recognition among scholars and the political public that since 2010, a Wave of Autocratization has grippe...

Social cohesion is crucial to increasing societies’ resilience to shocks and to enabling sustainable futures. Amidst growing tensions and polarization in all world regions, social cohesion ranks high on the agendas of researchers, decision-makers and international organizations. Despite the strong interest in the topic, there are major constraints to understanding its patterns, causes and effects: the lack of a common conceptualization and measurement of social cohesion. This paper contributes to filling these research gaps in three ways. First, it provides a narrow and operationalizable definition of social cohesion, which is well rooted in the long-standing literature in the social sciences and travels across world regions. According to this definition, social cohesion encompasses three main attributes: inclusive identity, trust and cooperation for the common good. All these attributes operate in a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Second, it proposes a measurement of social cohesion in Africa, relaying on household data from the Afrobarometer surveys and expert data from the V-Dem database. Third, it applies our indicators and provides empirical evidence that social cohesion varies across countries and within countries over time, and shows that overall social cohesion cannot be reduced to just one of such indicators. Our empirical analyses do not only mark the presence of four different constellations of social cohesion in Africa but the overall approach we take provides a first step towards measuring social cohesion at the global level.

The integrated and indivisible nature of the SDGs is facing implementation challenges due to the silo approaches. We present the three interconnected foci (SDG interactions, modeling, and tools) at the science-policy interface to address these challenges. Accounting for them will support accelerated SDG progress, operationalizing the integration and indivisibility principles.

Religious actors turned out to be key players in many of the current autocratization processes. So far, however, research on autocratization has paid only limited systematic attention to religious agency. The main contribution of this chapter is to provide the first systematic compilation of empirical findings on the role of religious agency in the third wave of autocratization. It assesses the applicability of widely used key concepts in the study of religion in regime change to the analysis of religious actors in autocratization processes. Making use of these concepts, the chapter assesses the main findings of current literature and identifies three typical roles of religious actors in autocratization: facilitator, victim, and defender. It argues that (un)intended effects of institutional path dependencies and institutional reforms of state–religion relations determine the influence and leverage of religious actors on autocratization processes. Furthermore, religious agency, in particular the emergence of nationalist religious movements, contributed substantially to autocratization, in particular through affective polarization strategies. There are reliable but only exemplary findings that religious actors helped to protect democracy. On this basis, the chapter ends with a proposal for a future research agenda.

The evidence generated and used in development cooperation has changed remarkably over the last decades. When it comes to the field of democracy support, these developments have been less significant. Routinised, evidence-based programming is far from a reality here. Compared to other fields, the goals of the interventions and assumed theories of change remain underspecified. Under these circumstances, evaluating and learning is difficult, and as a result, evidence gaps remain large and the translation of evidence into action often unsuccessful. This is particularly dramatic at a time when this field is regaining attention amid global autocratisation trends. In this article, we analyse the specific barriers and challenges democracy support faces to generate and use evidence. Furthermore, we identify evidence gaps and propose impact-oriented accompanying research as an evaluation approach that can make a significant contribution towards advancing the evidence agenda in this field.

This chapter provides an introduction to the study of international democracy promotion, which links two subdisciplines of political science: comparative politics and international relations. For students of comparative politics, understanding and explaining processes of democratization and autocratization requires an analysis of both domestic and international factors, notably the impact of external actors that attempt to support and protect democracy from the outside. The chapter thus introduces the concepts of democracy promotion and protection and discusses the dynamics in the face of global autocratization trends. The main part of the chapter makes students familiar with the motivations, functions, and effects of democracy promotion as well as conflicting objectives that often arise in foreign policy. It continues with a critical reflection on why and how the legitimacy for democracy promotion has been shrinking recently, but ends with new trends that might strengthen it, such as transnational social movements.