Does your child still vote for the Greens? The Green League and the environment in the Finnish parliamentary elections 2011.

Non peer reviewe

The Advocacy Coalition Index : A new approach for identifying advocacy coalitions(sic)(sic)(sic)Palabras clave

Policy scholars have increasingly focused on collaborative and competitive relationships between stakeholder coalitions. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in particular has directed scholarly attention toward such relationships. The ACF defines advocacy coalitions as groups of actors who share beliefs and coordinate their action. However, previous research has been inconsistent in defining and measuring coalitions, which has hampered comparative research and theory building. We present a method called the Advocacy Coalition Index, which measures belief similarity and the coordination of action in a manner that makes it possible to assess the extent to which advocacy coalitions are found in policy subsystems, whether subgroups resemble coalitions, and how individual actors contribute to coalition formation. The index provides a standardized method for identifying coalitions that can be applied to comparative research. To illustrate the effectiveness of the index, we analyze two climate change policy subsystems, namely Finland and Sweden, which have been shown to differ in terms of the association of belief similarity with coordination. We demonstrate that the index performs well in identifying the different types of subsystems, coalitions, and actors that contribute the most to coalition formation, as well as those involved in cross-coalition brokerage.Peer reviewe

Justifications Analysis : Understanding Moral Evaluations in Public Debates

This article introduces Justifications Analysis, a methodological approach for studying moral evaluations made in public debates. Established approaches to content analysis, most often building on the concept of framing, tend to overlook the moral dimension of public deliberation. We draw on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot's justification theory to present a typology of moral justifications, that is, ways of justifying arguments referring to varying understandings of the common good. We illustrate the use of the method through two case studies, one on the media debate on globalization and another on local political conflicts. We argue that this approach is particularly useful for understanding the differing degrees of institutionalization of moral categories and power relations within and across cultural contexts.Peer reviewe

Explaining collaboration in consensual and conflictual governance networks

The conditions under which policy beliefs and influential actors shape collaborative behaviour in governance networks are not well understood. This article applies exponential random graph models to network data from Finland and Sweden to investigate how beliefs, reputational power and the role of public authorities' structure collaboration ties into the two countries' climate change governance networks. Results show that only in Finland's conflictual climate policy domain do actors collaborate with those with similar beliefs and with reputational power, while only in Sweden's consensual climate policy domain do public authorities play central impartial coordinating roles. These results indicate that conflict is present in a governance network when beliefs and reputational power determine collaboration and that it is absent when public authorities occupy central roles. They also suggest that relative success in climate policy action is likely to occur when public authorities take on network manager roles.Peer reviewe

Of devils, angels and brokers : how social network positions affect misperceptions of political influence

Misperceiving political opponents as more influential and evil than they are has been described as the devil shift. More recently, the opposite phenomenon known as the angel shift has been recognised where political allies are misperceived as more influential and virtuous than they are. However, research on the devil and angel shifts has been hampered by the lack of measures that separate these mechanisms analytically. We analyse the misperception of influence and differentiate between the devil and angel shifts. Furthermore, previous research has failed to take notice of how social network positions contribute to these phenomena. We argue that conceptualising the different roles that brokers play between advocacy coalitions helps explain the occurrence of the devil and angel shifts. Our findings demonstrate that the devil and angel shifts are not dyadic but triadic phenomena between advocacy coalitions and that network factors accentuate both 'shifts'.Peer reviewe

Challenging the insider outsider approach to advocacy : how collaboration networks and belief similarities shape strategy choices

Advocacy strategies are a key success factor for public, private and third sector actors who participate in and seek to influence policy choices. Despite this, research on policy networks has paid little attention to the forms of advocacy studied by interest groups scholars. The interest groups' literature differentiates insider from outsider strategies and assumes that interest groups with strong access to policymakers opt for insider strategies, while those with weak access are constrained to the use of outsider strategies. This literature has not considered how the full set of actors that constitute a policy network use advocacy strategies. Furthermore, the insider/outsider dichotomy oversimplifies and neglects the possibility that actors' choices are interdependent. Using climate change policy network data from four countries that vary by interest group system, we investigate if policy actors' choices of advocacy strategies are similar to those in their collaboration network and to those with similar policy beliefs as their own. Results show that, irrespective of the context, actors are likely to use the same advocacy strategies as their collaboration partners and those whose policy beliefs are like their own. This research demonstrates the value of using a policy network approach to move beyond the insider/outsider dichotomy on interest groups' use of advocacy strategies. It makes a clear contribution to this scholarship by advancing the debate on strategies that policy actors employ to influence policymaking through evidencing interdependencies between the strategies used by policy actors due to belief similarity and a 'networking effect'.Peer reviewe

The Russian invasion of Ukraine selectively depolarized the Finnish NATO discussion on Twitter

It is often thought that an external threat increases the internal cohesion of a nation, and thus decreases polarization. We examine this proposition by analyzing NATO discussion dynamics on Finnish social media following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In Finland, public opinion on joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had long been polarized along the left-right partisan axis, but the invasion led to a rapid convergence of opinion toward joining NATO. We investigate whether and how this depolarization took place among polarized actors on Finnish Twitter. By analyzing retweet patterns, we find three separate user groups before the invasion: a pro-NATO, a left-wing anti-NATO, and a conspiracy-charged anti-NATO group. After the invasion, the left-wing anti-NATO group members broke out of their retweeting bubble and connected with the pro-NATO group despite their difference in partisanship, while the conspiracy-charged anti-NATO group mostly remained a separate cluster. Our content analysis reveals that the left-wing anti-NATO group and the pro-NATO group were bridged by a shared condemnation of Russia's actions and shared democratic norms, while the other anti-NATO group, mainly built around conspiracy theories and disinformation, consistently demonstrated a clear anti-NATO attitude. We show that an external threat can bridge partisan divides in issues linked to the threat, but bubbles upheld by conspiracy theories and disinformation may persist even under dramatic external threats.Peer reviewe