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The enormous growth in house prices in Europe since the 1990s has led to increasing concerns about the affordability of housing for ordinary citizens. This article explores the relationship between housing affordability - house prices relative to incomes - and the demand for redistributive and housing policy, using data drawn from European and British social surveys and an analysis of British elections. It shows that, as unaffordability rises, citizens appear in aggregate to become less supportive of redistribution, interventionist housing policy and left-wing parties. However, this aggregate rise, driven by the predominance of homeowners in most European countries, masks a growing polarization in preferences between renters and owners in less affordable regions.

Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under President Erdoğan's rule. Despite the abundant references to the 'people' in the populist rhetoric, it identifies personalization in foreign policy decision-making, nationalization in foreign policy implementation, and civilizationalization in the foreign policy discourse. Having established the patterns of populist foreign policy from a wider reading, this study then examines, generally, how populism has informed Turkish foreign policy and, specifically, Turkey's approach to the recent border disputes over the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Scholarship on US foreign policy regularly claims that US democracy promotion policy is informed by a coherent and harmonious set of basic premises. In this article, I first examine the validity of this claim for US post–Cold War administrations. I find operational in US foreign policy rhetoric three stable premises: that democracy is a universal(ly aspired to) principle, that external democracy promoters are legitimately involving themselves in another country's political affairs, and that this policy endeavor is in the best interest of all involved stakeholders. Following theoretical expectations that culture and cultural aspects are relatively stable and adaptable entities and promote stability in behavior, I then pursue the question of how these premises have fared in an environment particularly challenging to their validity, namely in the case of US democracy promotion in Egypt. I show how, even in light of contradictory evidence, the basic premises remain resilient and function as a discursive structure that enables and constrains policy options.

This paper examines the impact of regional sanctions on the trajectory of the Burundian regime following the 1996 coup. Despite the country's socioeconomic and geopolitical vulnerability, the Buyoya government initially withstood the pressure from sanctions. Through a vocal campaign against these measures, the new government mitigated the embargo's economic consequences and partially re-established its international reputation. Paradoxically, this campaign planted the seed for long-term comprehensive political concessions. While previous literature has attributed the embargo's success to its economic impact, the government actually responded to the sanction senders' key demand to engage in unconditional, inclusive peace talks once the economy had already started to recover. Based on a novel framework for studying the signalling dimension of sanctions, I show how the regime's anti-sanctions campaign, with its emphasis on the government's willingness to engage in peace talks, backfired, with Buyoya forced to negotiate after having become entrapped in his own rhetoric.

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has encouraged political scientists to re-examine the comparative literature on democratisation. A vast literature has now been produced comparing transitions from authoritarianism and democratisation in different parts of the world. However, there are two major omissions in the transition literature. First, the focus of research has primarily been on national level politics, and second, the relationship between federalism and democracy has largely been overlooked. This study seeks to redress this imbalance by moving the focus of research from the national level to the vitally important processes of institution building and democratisation at the local level and to the study of federalism and democratisation in Russia. Federal states are much more difficult to set up than unitary ones, and forging a new federal system at the same time as privatising the economy and trying to radically overhaul the political system has clearly made Russia's transition triply difficult. This book builds on Cameron Ross' earlier work, 'Regional Politics in Russia', by combining theoretical perspectives with empirical work to provide a comparative analysis of the electoral systems, party systems and governmental systems in the ethnic republics and regions and to assess the impact of theses different institutional arrangements on democratisation and federalism. Overall, this study argues that Russia's weak and asymmetrical form of federalism has played a major role in thwarting the consolidation of democracy. Federalism and democratisation in Russia exist in contradiction rather than harmony. In a vicious circle authoritarianism at the centre has been nourished by authoritarianism in the regions and vice versa. 'Elective dictatorships' and 'delegative democracies' are now well entrenched in many republics and authoritarian regimes are firmly established in a majority of the regions. This book will be vital reading for advan