Esther Somfalvy’s research while affiliated with Universität Bremen and other places

Since the mid-2000s, there has been no study of characteristics of political elites at large in East Central European countries. Accordingly, an assessment of long-term trends is not possible beyond narrow case studies of elite sub-segments. This research note introduces a new dataset covering officeholders for 3,277 position/years in six countries (the Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine) for seven reference years from 1990 to 2020. It points to results about broad development trends of political elites concerning sociodemographic characteristics and elite continuity. These include a high degree of sociodemographic homogeneity of elites across countries and time. Concerning the role of the old elites of the socialist regimes, there are considerable differences between the countries, caused among others by different approaches to lustration.

Studies of competitive authoritarian regimes regularly emphasize the political importance of media ownership, commonly assuming that the owners’ views are mirrored in the journalists’ writing and thus depriving journalists of a distinctive role. We move beyond this narrow perspective, analysing anti-regime protests by journalists in order to develop a better understanding of their role in competitive authoritarian regimes. Our exploratory case study of Ukraine—comparing the stable regime (2010-13) with the Euromaidan protests in late 2013/early 2014— is based on a protest event database of media freedom-related protest actions by journalists (N = 209) and interviews with journalists (N = 31). We examine protest forms, coalition building, claims and targets. To understand journalists’ agency in relation to political regime dynamics, we also look at their long-term engagement in contentious politics. While our results show that journalists’ own protest actions are not game changers, mainly due to journalists’ unwillingness to forge larger coalitions, the politicization of journalists, which leads to political activism and, most importantly, the creation of new media outlets with a political agenda, is an important element in regime dynamics and regime change.

Media control comprises multifaceted and amorphous phenomena, combining a variety of forms, tools, and practices. Today media control takes place in a sphere where national politics meet global technology, resulting in practices that bear features of both the (global) platforms and the affordances of national politics. At the intersection of these fields, we try to understand current practices of media control and the ways in which it may be resisted. This thematic issue is an endeavour to bring together conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to revise the scholarly discussion on media control. First, authors of this thematic issue re-assemble the notion of media control itself, as not being holistic and discrete (control vs freedom) but by considering it from a more critical perspective as having various modes and regimes. Second, this thematic issue brings a “micro” perspective into understanding and theorising media control. In comparison to structural and institutional perspectives on control, this perspective focuses on the agency of various actors (objects and subjects of media pressure) and their practices, motivations, and the resources with which they exert or resist control. Featuring cases from a broad range of countries with political systems ranging from democracy to electoral authoritarian regime, this issue also draws attention to the question of how media control relates to regime type.

On the example of Ukraine during the Yanukovich presidency (2010–2014) this article explores which factors support journalists’ agency in relation to censorship pressure in a competitive authoritarian regime. It shows that a critical mass of journalists existed who reacted to censorship pressure with rejection. Based, first of all, on 31 semi-structured interviews, we examine the working conditions of prominent national journalists and analyse how they describe their role and motivations. We argue that the nature of competitive authoritarianism offers journalists opportunities for critical reporting, but that it is individual characteristics of journalists—including professional ethics, networks, and job mobility—which define whether and how the respective opportunities are used.

Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan introduced a single-district closed-list proportional electoral system in 2007. Despite similar rules, the relationship between MPs and their constituencies differs: while the reform fostered nationwide representation in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan’s MPs maintained a local, personalised representation style. This article explores how similar electoral rules lead to divergent outcomes under diverse party systems. Based on legal documents and 25 original interviews, the article provides two in-depth accounts of how electoral rules interacted with institutional counterincentives to guide the representative behaviour of MPs. The analysis covers the effects on MPs’ re-election strategies and the organisation of constituency service within factions.