Research from Belgium shows that partisan, rather than policy goals lead to MPs’ media responsiveness

Media coverage influences the parliamentary agenda. Research in many different European countries has shown that MPs ask parliamentary questions or initiate debate about the news of the day. Julie Sevenans, Stefaan Walgrave and Debby Vos examine why they do so, by investigating whether Belgian politicians’ media responsiveness is influenced by their political goals. They find that media responsiveness is mainly a function of partisan goals. Politicians use the typically negative and conflict-rich media coverage to attack their opponents rather than to nurture substantial policy-making

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Replication Data for: What draws politicians’ attention. An experimental study of issue framing effects on individual political elites.

These data allow to replicate the main findings of the article in Political Behavio