This chapter examines how the Xi administration curtailed court-centered legal mobilization through a dual strategy of repression and co-optation. It traces the shift from the Hu-era tolerance of cause lawyering to a systematic effort under Xi to suppress and replace independent legal activism. Repressive measures included disbarment, arrest, and surveillance of rights lawyers and NGOs, especially those that leveraged judicial processes for political or social advocacy. At the same time, the party-state co-opted regime-aligned cause lawyers by granting them official recognition, resources, and selective legal access. This dual approach prevented the emergence of court–civil society synergy that could threaten Party authority, while allowing for a managed form of legal activism that channeled contentious claims into politically acceptable frames. The chapter argues that dejudicialization through activist suppression – rather than legal exclusion alone – was central to insulating the courts from becoming platforms of opposition, reinforcing the dual state's boundaries by preempting politicized litigation before it reached the judiciary.

Chapter 6 investigates the erosion of electoral integrity in Venezuela, focusing on the transformation of the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) from a partially autonomous institution into a politically captured body under Hugo Chávez and his successors. The chapter shows how reforms that insulated the National Electoral Council (CNE) from partisan influence, which intended to protect independence, paradoxically weakened transparency and accountability. Without mechanisms for party consultation, internal checks declined, administrative discretion expanded, and opportunities for manipulation increased. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the chapter analyzes controversial decisions related to districting, voter registration, technology adoption, and election timing. It argues that Venezuela illustrates the risks of insulation without meaningful stakeholder engagement and provides a powerful contrast to cases where partisan inclusion stabilizes electoral governance.

By design, the judiciary is meant to be independent from politics and thereby free from factional pressures. The power to review legislative and executive as well as state government actions for constitutionality is essential to controlling abuses of power and democratic excesses that infringe on individual rights. While the federal courts have generally performed these responsibilities well, the politization of judicial appointments combined with liberal standing requirements and reliance on an assortment of balancing tests that require policy judgments have invited factional pressures in the form of lawsuits. At the same time, a presumption of constitutionality has served to counter the Framers’ constraints on democratic excess and the abuse of power.

Projects whose very nature requires the involvement of government experts while simultaneously engaging politicians also involve higher risks of self-inflicted vulnerability. When self-management remains insufficient and boundary spanning across multiple jurisdictions is weak or absent, the influence of political actors, who inevitably lack ‘system knowledge’ and can ‘afford not to learn’, can easily be counterproductive. This is what the case of the German Reform of money laundering prevention of 2017 illustrates. What was intended as an improvement of law enforcement resulted in administrative disaster with the consequence of tens of thousands of cases of suspected money-laundering remaining unprocessed among which thousands of cases of financing terrorism. The case analysis underlines the relevance of a common understanding of a project’s mission among the stakeholders plus a communication strategy that stimulates the spirit of a common cause. Achieving stakeholder consensus in public sector projects is particularly challenging, however, due to the potential incompatibility between the rationale of politicians seeking to secure constituency support and that of experts striving to maintain their professional identity and standing. Which implies that one fundamental challenge of public sector project management is that the will of political actors to disregard existing expert knowledge is as unpredictable as their ability to get away with it through skillful communication.

FFramework climate laws have been enacted across a growing range of countries, and are often assumed to provide stability in terms of climate policymaking. This chapter provides a more nuanced assessment. I argue that, while some common design elements of framework climate laws do indeed serve to bring stability to climate policymaking, in many respects framework climate laws depart from the ideal design type envisioned by the literature on time inconsistency, commitment devices, and non-majoritarian institutions. Moreover, framework climate laws can actually serve to make explicit political conflicts and sectoral trade-offs, and can thus serve to politicize even as they depoliticize. Furthermore, by seeking to introduce stability to climate policymaking in the sense of stability in policy design over time, framework climate laws simultaneously and deliberately seek to undermine and challenge stability as status quo. The chapter draws on examples of framework climate laws principally in European countries to illustrate the argument.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

As coal burning was explicitly politicized with reference to coal’s contributions to climate change over the last ten to fifteen years, a number of policy norms associated with phasing out coal burning (or its financing) have emerged and stabilized in transnational politics. This chapter tracks aspects of these normative politics focusing on both the promulgation and diffusion of the new policy norms and a number of critiques and challenges – many grounded in distributional and procedural justice – to coal phaseout norms that emerge as a response to the transnational promulgation of coal phaseout policies.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

Norway is an active player in international climate politics, with strong consensus on the issue underpinned by cross-party Climate Settlements. Despite this, Norway has only marginally reduced its domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, attempts to establish a new Climate Settlement in 2021 failed. Does this failure constitute a break with Norway’s consensual climate tradition, and is this good or bad news for climate policy? In this chapter, we investigate whether and to what extent the consensus characterizing the 2000s and 2010s contributed to climate policy development or stasis. Focusing on two key sectors – petroleum and transport – we find that key Norwegian climate policies have developed through a dynamic tension of depoliticization and repoliticization over time, with mixed effects. We identify reasons for depoliticization and repoliticization and argue that it is useful to embrace agnosticism in the debate over politicization versus policy stability, instead exploring this on an empirical and contextual basis. Moreover, we uncover a dynamic of politicization in one policy area affecting policy development in another, arguing that such spillover effects warrant analytical attention.

This chapter investigates in detail the bargaining dynamics surrounding the economic governance reforms as well as their direction and timing. It contrasts expectations derived from traditional theories of European integration, that is, liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism, with those from more recent postfunctionalist/new intergovernmentalist perspectives. It argues that Council-centred enforcement, which, despite noncompliance, has been a dominant design feature at least until the sovereign debt crisis, does not sit comfortably with traditional theories but can be explained by policy salience and implementation uncertainties. On the other hand, the emphasis that traditional approaches assign to supranational pressures, such as noncompliance, commitment problems, threats of exclusion and veto, issue linkages, path dependencies, and supranational decision-making, allows to adequately account for the overall direction of reforms towards more tightening and delegation, notwithstanding the pooled enforcement in recent ancillary measures. Postfunctionalist theories overall fall short in highly politicized contexts, exactly where they should do most of the explaining.

This chapter examines the relationship between a politicized public sector and democratic backsliding. It is argued that politicization of public employment is an important, if understudied, component of the institutional landscape that makes democracy vulnerable. Bureaucratic politicization increases the likelihood that backsliding becomes endogenous by generating electoral advantages for incumbents and by raising the stakes of control over government. Politicization of the state administration allows incumbents to dole out patronage jobs; introduce political loyalty tests as a precondition for accessing basic government services; press public employees into campaign-related work; and utilize state funds for political purposes. Building on this volume’s aim of untangling the relationship between institutional subversion and backsliding, particular attention is given to the timing and sequencing of these processes. Evidence from Eastern Europe and a global sample shed light on how governments in countries that once seemed to be the front-runners of democratization concentrated political power by extending the economic reach of the state and subverting public sector independence. This study contributes to research on the illiberal political economy that supports backsliding regimes and their capture of key levers of political power.