Papers

Cities have become central actors in migration governance, not only as implementers of national policies but also as sites of innovation and collaboration. While research has highlighted cities’ growing involvement in migration and integration, less attention has been paid to the processes through which they acquire the knowledge and capacity to shape these policies. This article addresses this gap by examining policy learning as a key mechanism through which cities engage with migration challenges and opportunities. To explore this, the study focuses on two cities – Fuenlabrada (Spain) and Ghent (Belgium) – that have shown strong engagement in migration matters and promoted inclusive approaches. The research adopts a qualitative, comparative case study design, combining document analysis with semi-structured interviews with local policymakers, civil society actors, and other stakeholders. This methodology makes it possible to trace how knowledge is acquired, exchanged, and mobilised in policymaking, as well as how contextual factors influence learning dynamics. By examining how different forms of learning emerge and how political, institutional, and social contexts shape them, the article seeks to shed light on the mechanisms that enable cities to adapt, build capacity, and respond to migration challenges. The study aims to contribute to migration scholarship by shifting attention from policy outcomes to the learning processes that underpin them, and to broader debates on urban governance by highlighting the ways in which local governments acquire and utilise knowledge in addressing complex and contested policy issues.

Why do citizens continue to protest despite high costs and low chances of success? Existing research has emphasised instrumental and expressive logics to explain this paradox, but has paid far less attention to the role of moral motivations. This paper investigates the extent to which a duty to protest drives individual engagement, arguing that this moral attitude operates both as a stable disposition and a contextually activated norm. Drawing on three recent waves of the Spanish Political Attitudes (POLAT) panel survey, I examine whether individuals driven by a strong sense of duty are more likely to engage in protest across different domains. Results demonstrate that the duty to protest consistently predicts participation across protest types, with stronger between-person differences than within-person variation. Specifically, individuals with higher average levels of duty are substantially more likely to protest, even after accounting for conventional predictors such as political interest, union membership, and ideology. These findings provide the first longitudinal evidence in political science that duty independently motivates participation across diverse forms of protest action. The study advances theoretical debates by showing that protest is not merely strategic or expressive, but also morally driven, and calls for greater attention to civic duty in explanations of contentious action.

Do extremists exhibit similar patterns of political information-seeking online? In recent years, social media and the Internet have been blamed for spreading toxic and extremist discourse. However, we still know very little about the pathways and types of information sources accessed by individuals who self-identify as extreme leftists or rightists. In this paper, we examine the information consumption habits of individuals with different ideological leanings. Using panel survey data and web-tracking data from 893 individuals in Spain, collected one month before and after the 2023 General Election, we analyze all political content individuals were exposed to in online news outlets and YouTube channels using Large Language Models (LLMs). Next, by implementing Markov chains and Association Rules, we sequentially trace all information pathways among far-right, far-left, and the remainder of the population. Preliminary results indicate that far-right individuals consume more political content than the average respondent, accessing content from legacy media, extremist websites, and YouTube political videos. They also differ from far-left individuals and non-extremists in the pathways and social media referrals they use to access those information sources, tending to remain in extremist sources and moving to them just after having read Legacy Outlets, which they do  more often than other individuals. These findings reveal distinct pathways and information diets among individuals, highlighting ideological differences and the role of social media and the Internet in shaping polarized political habits.

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) has become a central instrument of contemporary regulatory governance. Quantified estimates of regulatory compliance costs play a particularly prominent role in political debates on administrative burden, competitiveness, and regulatory reform. Yet these estimates are produced within institutional frameworks that shape what is measured, how it is reported, and which regulatory effects become visible. This paper examines how threshold-based reporting rules distort aggregate estimates of regulatory compliance costs. Using data from Germany’s Online-Datenbank der Entlastungs- und Belastungswirkungen von Regelungen (OnDEA), I show that the mandatory €1 million reporting threshold leads to systematic censoring of cost information. I develop a reconstruction approach to assess the magnitude of this distortion and demonstrate that correcting for censoring increases estimated annual compliance costs by 11.6 percent for business regulations, 21.2 percent for public administration, and 5.2 percent for citizen-related regulations. The findings underscore that regulatory cost indicators reflect institutional measurement rules as much as regulatory substance and highlight the political consequences of seemingly technical reporting conventions.