This article is a study of people with dwarfism employed as court dwarfs during the reigns of Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV of France. Through an analysis of the varying positions held by people with dwarfism at court and the roles they performed there, it challenges existing historiographies that emphasise the wonder their physical difference elicited and their function as the monarch’s alter ego to explain their presence at court. Instead of focusing on symbolic meanings attached to dwarfism, this study centres on the activities and experiences of people with dwarfism. This approach reveals that the invisibility of people with dwarfism in the archive is partly due to their reticence to be identified with the office of court dwarf. Indeed, they struggled to power the institutional development of the office because it was a constant reminder of their marginal status at court. The office’s eventual disappearance under Louis XIV thus reveals how marginalisation combined with processes of institutionalisation to destabilise the lives and careers of people with dwarfism at court. The article’s analysis rests on a granular approach to primary sources, re-emphasising the value of archival research for the study of marginalised groups, even when surviving material is relatively lacking.

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is an essential tool for transparent decision-making and prioritisation of resources routinely used in many high-income countries. The use of HTA in resource allocation is now gaining traction in several Low- and Middle-Income Countries too. India is one such country that has taken critical steps to integrate HTA into its policymaking framework. We explore the potential role of Adaptive (aHTA) as a screening measure and a more flexible approach to optimising the capacity of HTA. Adaptive HTA, as ‘a structured approach to identify and conduct the optimised full HTA analysis’, offers a pragmatic way to balance the need for swift decision-making with methodological rigour. We examined the value aHTA brings to decision-makers based on the Indian experiences in conducting aHTA and further discussed the challenges involved in its methodology and implementation. Institutionalising aHTA is proposed as both a tool for topic prioritisation and optimising the full HTA for timely decision-making, integrated within the broader HTA ecosystem in India. Given the evolving nature of aHTA methods and processes, we propose that there is a need to: standardise aHTA methodologies and develop reference cases which benchmark a set of guiding principles, methodological, and reporting standards.

The European Council regularly intervenes in everyday law-making by expressing legislative priorities in summit conclusions. We theorise and analyse the impact of these priorities on the duration of the EU’s co-decision (or ordinary legislative) procedure. Theoretically, we argue that the European Council increases speed through leadership. Leadership translates, via political authority, into limited hierarchical relations between the national heads of state or government on the one hand and the co-legislators on the other. Drawing on scholarship on institutionalisation, crisis politics, and multi-level negotiation, we hypothesise that the European Council’s priorities can speed up co-legislation. ‘Speeding up’ should happen, in particular, from late 2009 onwards, when the European Council became a formal EU institution and in crisis-related laws, when leaders leverage their EU-level authority. We assess our argument by using a mixed-methods design. Our new dataset combines concluded legislation and pending proposals between 1999 and 2024 with the European Council’s legislative priorities. Event history analysis is bolstered with qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. We find that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Against our expectation, the European Council’s priorities do not accelerate legislation under crisis, but crisis-related laws themselves are concluded faster. Our paper provides new insights into how the European Council impacts everyday law-making and on the widely debated topic of leadership in the EU and in other multi-level systems.

Authoritarian incumbents routinely use democratic emulation as a strategy to extend their tenure in power. Yet, there is also evidence that multiparty competition makes electoral authoritarianism more vulnerable to failure. Proceeding from the assumption that the outcomes of authoritarian electoral openings are inherently uncertain, it is argued in this article that the institutionalisation of elections determines whether electoral authoritarianism promotes stability or vulnerability. By ‘institutionalisation’, it is meant the ability of authoritarian regimes to reduce uncertainty over outcomes as they regularly hold multiparty elections. Using discrete‐time event‐history models for competing risks, the effects of sequences of multiparty elections on patterns of regime survival and failure in 262 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010 are assessed, conditioned on their degree of competitiveness. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of electoral uncertainty enhances authoritarian regime survival. However, for competitive electoral authoritarian regimes this entails substantial risk. The first three elections substantially increase the probability of democratisation, with the danger subsequently diminishing. This suggests that convoking multiparty competition is a risky game with potentially high rewards for autocrats who manage to institutionalise elections. Yet, only a small number of authoritarian regimes survive as competitive beyond the first few elections, suggesting that truly competitive authoritarianism is hard to institutionalise. The study thus finds that the question of whether elections are dangerous or stabilising for authoritarianism is dependent on differences between the ability of competitive and hegemonic forms of electoral authoritarianism to reduce electoral uncertainty.

A comparative survey of the main journal of the Political Studies Association (Political Studies) and of its French counterpart, the journal of the Association Française de Science Politique (Revue Française de Science Politique), between 1951 and 2002, reveals that the two political science communities have not followed the same road to institutionalisation. Three types of differences are analysed: the struggle of the discipline for legitimacy, and its evolution to differentiation and internationalisation.

Party institutionalisation is a central problem in political science. The literature tends to understand it as a syndrome and therefore has difficulty explaining variations. This article suggests a new approach based on the transaction between a legislative party and its deputies, the failure of which is observable in party switching. Three routes to institutionalisation are identified by appealing to the vote‐seeking, office‐seeking or policy‐seeking motivations of deputies. Poland has had a large volume of party switching, along with wide variation in the incentives facing differently‐motivated deputies. Survival analyses of switching in four Polish parliaments find that vote‐seeking is the most likely route to institutionalisation for Polish parties. Moreover, in this article a concrete hypothesis is established for comparative testing: legislative parties can survive as long as their popular support exceeds 40 per cent of their share in the previous election.

The Higher Education landscape is constantly evolving. Larger and more diverse student cohorts, the growing demands for flexibility and accessibility, but not at the expense of quality, have been driving universities to reimagine learning spaces by using the affordances of digital technologies. While there is an abundance of literature on individual experimentation with blended learning formats at course level, there are far fewer accounts of institutional implementation. This article analyses four cases of institutionalised blended learning implementation at European universities, with a disciplinary focus on political science and international relations. By exploring the strategies, structures and support (Graham et al. in Internet High Educ 18:4–14, 2013), we aim to understand at what stage in the institutionalisation process each case can be situated. Based on our research, we identify five critical factors for a mature blended learning institutional implementation: an integrative approach, a gradual development model, a rigorous evaluation process, strong relations with the university and openness towards cooperation.

Which new parties entered national parliaments in advanced democracies over the last four decades and how did they perform after their national breakthrough? This article argues that distinguishing two types of party formation (that facilitate or complicate party institutionalisation) helps to explain why some entries flourish, while others vanish quickly from the national stage. New parties formed by individual entrepreneurs that cannot rely on ties to already organised groups are less likely to get reelected to parliament after breakthrough than rooted newcomers. This hypothesis is tested on a newly compiled dataset of new parties that entered parliaments in 17 advanced democracies from 1968 onwards. Applying multilevel analyses, the factors that shape newcomers' capacity to reenter parliament after breakthrough are assessed. Five factors have significant effects, yet affect party performance only in particular phases: both a party's electoral support at breakthrough and its operation in a system with a strong regional tier increase the likelihood of initial reelection. In contrast, a distinct programmatic profile, the permissiveness of the electoral system and easy access to free broadcasting increase a party's chance of repeated reelection. Only formation type significantly affects both phases and does so most strongly, substantiating the theoretical approach used in this article.

Internationalisation among European political scientists is not uniform and while research emphasises variations between Western and Eastern Europe, we known less about the contrasting patterns of internationalisation among countries in Central and Eastern Europe. This contribution aims to identify if there are different patterns of internationalisation among groups of countries in the East and what factors influence diverging or converging trajectories. We look at how historical institutionalisation of the discipline, European Union membership, and levels of national funding impact internationalisation in four groups of countries, for three different profiles of international scholars. Relying on data from the 2018 ProSEPS survey among European political scientists, we find that historical legacies have a significant negative impact on levels of internationalisation for all profiles of international scholars. On the other hand, higher access to national funding and EU resources has a positive impact on internationalisation, but not as significant. We conclude that legacies matter and that Europeanisation and access to resources leads to a slow convergence in internationalisation of political scientists form Eastern and Western Europe.

Despite over 50 years of advocacy and policymaking toward deinstitutionalization, residential institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) remain operational in six Canadian provinces. In addition, the lack of public, community-based housing has led to contemporary housing models that represent the re- or trans-institutionalization of labelled people. This article asks: why does the institutionalization of people labelled with IDD still occur in Canada? We argue that institutionalization is propelled by a policy legacy of systemic ableism that is manifested in three pervasive logics, which “haunt” the public provision of IDD housing: exclusion, elimination, and extraction. Empirical support is drawn from textual analysis and interviews with policymakers, advocates and people labelled with IDD in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Nova Scotia). We conclude by discussing the interrelation of institutionalization and systemic ableism and presenting implications for counteracting ableism in Canadian IDD housing policy.

This study aims to provide insights into the values entrenchment strategies that indigenous Black founders and next-generation (NextGen) leaders use in their efforts to entrench values into their family businesses. The study uses a qualitative methodology and an inductive approach, and draws on seven indigenous African family business cases operating in various industries within the services sector. Our findings show that founders and NextGen leaders use explicit and implicit carriers as they strive to entrench values in their family businesses. It was established that these leaders are influential institutional constituents who contribute to entrenching values into the family business and, by doing so, shape institutional knowledge. Our study contributes to family business literature by extending the founder centrality to include that of the NextGen leaders in values entrenchment, explaining how these leaders articulate their personal and family values and how they seek to translate them into family business values.

The history of mining education in late Qing China has received relatively little attention in scholarly literature. Through the lens of institutionalising global mining knowledge, this article addresses the following questions: How did the demand for expertise within the framework of mining bureaucracy evolve under the impact of Western imperialism? How did mining education enter scholarly discourse and become eventually institutionalised in the late Qing China? Drawing on evidence from the collections of Sheng Xuanhuai's archive series, it investigates two previously overlooked ‘failures’ of Sheng's mining-related enterprises, namely his earliest mining practices in Hubei in the 1870s and his proposal for establishing a mining school in Shandong in 1888–89. It then reconnects these efforts with the histories of Western learning, late Qing mining bureaucracy, the monetary crisis of that era, and the global recruitment of engineers despite a pronounced distrust of foreign expertise. It argues that these seemingly discrete efforts or ‘failures’ in fact paved the way for initiating China's first engineering university as well as other mining colleges in around 1895 and eventually led to the rise of engineering education before the entire educational system was transformed in China.

Social protection has expanded unevenly across Africa because of variations in both the initial adoption of programmes and their subsequent ‘institutionalisation’ through government-funded expansions in coverage. The case of Zambia illustrates how policy coalitions promoting the institutionalisation of social protection compete with other claimants over prioritisation in public spending. Even when faced with competitive elections, incumbent governments may prioritise other programmes over social protection. In Zambia, the incumbent government announced and budgeted for a massive government-funded expansion of social protection but failed to allocate the necessary funding – with the result that benefits were not paid to registered beneficiaries. If ‘institutionalisation’ is understood as entailing the political irreversibility of expansion, then the rhetoric of institutionalisation belied the reality (for several years) of retrenchment. The weakened policy coalition supporting social protection was unable to prevent government defunding as scarce government resources were allocated to competing programmes.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi problematised the commodity status of labour. He described it as ‘fictitious’ and asserted the human aspect of labour necessitates ‘protection’. In bringing Polanyi’s mature works to bear on these claims, this article uses the ‘fictitious commodity’ concept to highlight the tension in neoclassical theory between concrete reality and its idealist construction of the economy. This contradiction directly challenges the veracity of the self-regulating market. The article develops two related themes. The first is Polanyi’s critique of the neoclassical conception of ‘the economy’ as an ideal (market) construct which gave rise to the notion that labour could be regulated by the forces of supply and demand. The second is the lack of logic in the notion of a ‘self regulating’ market and Polanyi’s appreciation of the concrete tendencies of capitalist economies to develop institutional arrangements that ensure the economy is always, and necessarily, more than ‘the market’.