Housing affordability is one of the main aspects required for sustainable development and society. However, the timely delivery of new homes is often constrained by the need to upgrade and expand essential infrastructure such as water and electricity networks. For water utilities, responses to growth typically involve intensive hydraulic analysis to assess water distribution systems (WDS) capacity, identify upgrade needs and evaluate options for system extensions. This process becomes significantly complex and resource-intensive under high growth conditions, where a higher volume of faster answers is required to address a wide range of uncertain future scenarios. This paper presents a concept of using generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) integrating with hydraulic models to form an AI Agent to support WDS design. Specific features of Gen AI used within the hydraulic agent are discussed. A real-life case study demonstrated that the AI agent can analyse land development requests, trigger hydraulic simulations and identify augmentation needed, significantly reducing manual tasks. This offers a breakthrough strategy for water distribution system design and planning to enable sustainable water infrastructure development.

The aim of this editorial is to provide an update about the Journal of Management & Organization in terms of its progress during the year 2025. This will help to understand how the journal has progressed over time and the main changes occurring in 2025 in term of analysis of articles, subject topic, author, reviewer, and other relevant information. To do this, a historical perspective is provided that highlights the main contributions in 2025 that are especially relevant given the journal’s 30th birthday celebrations. The core management topics and areas of interest published in 2025 are discussed in terms of final decisions about total number of articles accepted and acceptances based on country of main authors. A list of best reviewers for the journal is included as well as a published list of reviewers. The journal metrics are discussed as well as future objectives and goals.

We examine the consequences of controversies on corporate reputation and identify a strategy that companies often adopt to restore their trust relationships with stakeholders in the aftermath of media condemnation. In the post-controversy period, firms appear to use a bolstering strategy of engaging more actively in philanthropic activities. In terms of regaining reputation, as measured by the increase in the Britain’s Most Admired Companies ranking, such strategy proves to be ineffectual. This may be because charitable giving in such context could be viewed as superficial virtue signaling rather than a fundamental change in the company’s ethical stance.

Anti‐pluralist parties have come to power in democracies around the world. However, only a subset of them have induced democratic backsliding while in government, raising the question of why some anti‐pluralist governments subvert democracy while others are more reluctant. I argue that anti‐pluralist incumbents undermine democratic institutions most severely during times of weak citizen support for democracy. In such settings, anti‐pluralist parties in power face a low risk of voter punishment and public backlash. By contrast, in democracies where citizens' commitment to democratic rule is strong, the cost of attacking democratic institutions for incumbents is considerably higher, making democratic backsliding less likely. I test this theory by combining data from public opinion surveys, party systems and democratic downturns in 100 democracies and implement dynamic time‐series cross‐section models covering the period from 1990 to 2019. Consistent with expectations, periods in which anti‐pluralist parties are in government during times of weak citizen support for democracy predict episodes of democratic decline. These findings have implications for the potential of citizens to constrain anti‐pluralist incumbents in pursuing undemocratic reforms.

This article problematises traditionalist thinking in constitutional adjudication in relation to the rights of same-sex couples, especially those rights that are connected to family life. It identifies two approaches, represented respectively by the case law of the Italian Constitutional Court (ItCC) and the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) of the Hong Kong SAR of the People’s Republic of China. The ItCC has expressly stated that preserving traditional family forms is a reasonable objective per se for the legislature to pursue. The CFA, on the other hand, has challenged this approach to traditionalist thinking in relation to same-sex unions. Despite some contradictory signals within its case law, the CFA has stated that justifying differential treatment based on sexual orientation with reference to tradition is circular reasoning. Drawing on historical, anthropological, and philosophical sources, this article argues that invoking the preservation of tradition, despite its rhetorical force, is empirically and conceptually criticisable and, ultimately, unpersuasive.

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open‐door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull‐effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.

Does candidate gender matter for vote choice? Whereas experimental research suggests an average preference for female candidates, observational studies tend to find null effects. In this note, we address the recent debate on how to measure voter preferences on the aggregate and the individual level. We argue that candidate gender preferences exist, but that whether and when they are revealed varies between and within voters. Drawing on an observational design and using data from over 500,000 individual ballots in Lithuanian elections, we employ multilevel regression and exponential random graph models to show how voters' candidate gender preferences are distributed across the electorate and how they vary in size and direction. We find that about half of all voters prefer either male or female candidates. Whereas preference for male candidates tends to be revealed in the first and second preference votes, preference for female candidates is first revealed in lower preference votes. Our results help explain contradictory findings in the literature and illustrate how observational data and methods can be used to assess voter preferences within electorates.

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

Online public consultations are an instrument frequently used by governments to invite citizens and interest organisations to participate in the formulation of public policies. A key feature of the consultation design is the prerogative of policymakers to send formal invitations to consultations with stakeholders. The extent to which these invitations shape the patterns of stakeholder participation in online consultations is a relevant theoretical and empirical research puzzle that remains largely overlooked in the literature on participatory governance and bureaucratic policymaking. Our study addresses this gap in research and asks: Do government invitations to consultations increase the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in online public consultations? We explain when and why the number of government invitations is systematically associated with higher levels of participation and diversity of stakeholder interests and how this systematic co‐variation is conditional upon the policy act type on which the government consults. We test our argument on a new dataset containing information about 251,153 instances of stakeholder participation in 4062 online public consultations organised by the Norwegian government across all policy areas during 2009–2023. We find that a higher number of government invitations is systematically associated with significantly higher stakeholder participation, higher diversity of interests represented and a higher likelihood of and more frequent citizen participation. This positive association is, however, moderate in size and is also conditional upon policy act type. Invitations increase participation and stakeholder diversity more in consultations on legislative acts and government reports relative to all other acts. These are acts on which the demand for stakeholder participation successfully meets stakeholders’ interest in supplying it. Our study underscores the importance of government invitations as a relevant feature of consultation design that shapes patterns of participation in public consultations while accounting for the impact of the policy context in which consultations are organised.

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes – such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability – for higher incomes. Through a seven‐country conjoint experiment, we analyse how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their ‘willingness to pay’ – or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

How do the economic effects of immigration affect radical right support? The evidence in support of the labour market competition theory — which posits that the economic threat posed by immigration to jobs and wages leads to radical right voting — has been mixed. On the one hand, individual‐level surveys underreport economic drivers because of social desirability bias. On the other hand, contextual studies show contradictory findings due to an over‐reliance on units of analysis that are too aggregated to meaningfully capture the competitive threat posed by immigrants. This paper identifies the influence of labour market competition on radical right voting at a local level in contexts where native workers are directly affected by the arrival of immigrants who have similar or higher skillsets. Using an original longitudinal dataset of fine‐grained municipal electoral, demographic and economic data from France over the 2002–2017 period, the paper provides empirical evidence of local contextual influences of economic competition between natives and immigrants of any skillset. Under local conditions of material deprivation, measured by the local unemployment rate, the effect of labour market competition on municipalities’ radical right vote share is amplified. Moreover, higher radical right support is observed in municipalities with a higher share of any one of the following groups: low‐skilled natives, medium‐skilled immigrants or high‐skilled immigrants. This supports the hypothesis that immigrants with higher qualifications are compelled to accept lower‐skilled jobs, and are thus perceived as a competitive threat to low‐skilled natives. By reconciling radical right contextual studies and research on the political economy of immigration policies, this paper highlights the importance of a local analysis in detecting the effect of labour market competition on radical right support. This paper also explains why some local areas are more prone to radical right support than others over time.

What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy‐making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra‐cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.

Recent decades have been marked by the rise of populism, the emergence of New Labour and decline of social democratic parties. The dominant explanation for these trends is a shift in cultural attitudes but leaves open where such a sudden shift comes from. Advancing recent cross‐sectional work on the political economy of housing, this paper suggests that slow‐moving underlying processes as materialized in the expansion of homeownership can help explain the observable cultural shift and recent macrotrends. Taking a longitudinal micro‐perspective of individuals’ housing and political trajectories in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom since the 1980s, we find that the transition into homeownership has made voting for social democrats and populists more likely. The influence never comes as a shock but extends over decade‐long anticipation and socialization intervals. Rather than strengthening traditional conservative parties, expanding homeownership, we argue, has contributed to the gradual embourgeoisement of the left.

Researchers classify political parties into families by their shared cleavage origins. However, as parties have drifted from the original ideological commitments, it is unclear to what extent party families today can function as effective heuristics for shared positions. We propose an alternative way of classifying parties based solely on their ideological positions as one solution to this challenge. We use model‐based clustering to recast common subjective decisions involved in the process of creating party groups as problems of model selection, thus, providing non‐subjective criteria to define ideological clusters. By comparing canonical families to our ideological clusters, we show that while party families on the right are often too similar to justify categorizing them into different clusters, left‐wing families are weakly internally cohesive. Moreover, we identify two clusters predominantly composed of parties in Eastern Europe, questioning the degree to which categories originally designed to describe Western Europe can generalize to other regions.

Recent literature argues that with ever‐increasing levels of supranational constraints governments have less ‘room to manoeuvre’; therefore, voters will place less weight on policy outcomes in their voting decisions. The question that remains less explored is how voters fill this accountability gap. We argue that, in this context, voters may move away from outcome‐ to input‐oriented voting. Fulfilling their promises becomes less vital for incumbents as long as they exhibit effort to overturn an unpopular policy framework. We test this argument against a survey experiment conducted in the run‐up to the September 2015 election in Greece, where we find a positive impact of the incumbent's exerted effort to challenge the status quo of austerity on vote intention for SYRIZA – the senior coalition government partner at the time – despite the failed outcome of the government's bailout negotiations.

In democracies, electoral mandates are meant to shape public policy. But how much leeway do elected representatives actually have to implement it? Influential scholars think that (horizontal and vertical) institutional hurdles, budget constraints and political pressure dilute mandate responsiveness, but empirical evidence for this important claim remains scarce. This article provides a theoretical model and an empirical account of the extent to which different types of constraints limit the capacity of governing parties to set their electoral priorities on the agenda. Using fixed‐effects Poisson regression on German electoral and legislative priorities over a period of over three decades (1983–2016), we conclude that policies reflect electoral priorities to a greater extent than scholarship has acknowledged so far. We do confirm, however, the constraining effects of Europeanization, shrinking budget leeway, intra‐coalition disagreement and low executive popularity. We elaborate on the implications for theories of public policy, democratic representation and comparative politics.