Chapter 1 introduces the core question of the book: how does globalization affect parties’ ability to keep campaign promises and how do they adapt in response? It argues that globalization imposes structural constraints on policymaking that challenge the traditional model of promissory representation, in which parties make pledges and are held accountable for their fulfillment. The chapter presents a theoretical framework linking international economic integration to promise-breaking and outlines the mechanisms through which parties strategically adapt: by modifying the clarity and content of their promises and increasingly using populist or ambiguous rhetoric. It introduces the book’s multimethod approach, combining cross-national pledge data, case studies, and experimental evidence. The chapter also situates the argument in the broader literature on democratic representation, highlighting both the persistence of voter expectations for accountability and the evolving pressures parties face in fulfilling them. This sets the stage for the book’s empirical analyses of how promise-breaking, ideological repositioning, populist framing, and strategic ambiguity reflect broader efforts by political parties to remain electorally competitive while navigating a more constrained and interdependent policy environment.

Chapter 10 examines how ambiguity in campaign promises affects electoral accountability. Building on the previous chapter’s findings that political parties often employ vague language to manage constraints, this chapter evaluates whether such ambiguity allows parties to avoid punishment when pledges are unfulfilled. Drawing on a combination of original survey experiments and cross-national observational data, the analysis shows that voters are generally less likely to punish broken promises when they were made ambiguously. Ambiguity thus serves as a strategic tool that helps parties obscure responsibility and minimize electoral costs, highlighting the trade-off between strategic communication and democratic responsiveness.

In 1949 Isaiah Berlin published a notice in the Atlantic Monthly of Their Finest Hour. Berlin’s essay was subsequently reissued as a standalone publication, entitled ‘Mr Churchill in 1940’, in 1964 It is Berlin’s paean of praise to Churchill as ‘the saviour of his country’. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Berlin’s original text is an opportune time to take another look at it. With the longer perspective of hindsight, it has become clear how uncritically Berlin accepted Churchill’s version of events in Their Finest Hour and of the part he had played in them. Throughout 1940, Churchill was less ‘sure he would not fail’ than he retrospectively alleged. Nor were his relations with Roosevelt as close as he suggested. And notwithstanding his claims to the contrary, Churchill did discuss the possibility of reaching a peace deal with Hitler in the summer of 1940. There is a further point. For despite the boundless admiration that Berlin lavished on Churchill, he did not ‘really like the company of great men’, Churchill included. Yet he also admitted that ‘if there is to be public life, it cannot be conducted by such as us’.

This chapter examines how conservative parties strategically adapt their political appeals in response to the constraints imposed by globalization. Confronted with the challenge of reconciling their long-standing commitments to market liberalism with rising voter demands for protection and control, these parties increasingly adopt populist rhetoric to reshape the terms of political competition. Rather than abandoning core economic positions, conservative parties shift their emphasis to anti-elite, nationalist, and antiglobalist themes, recasting political debates around identity, sovereignty, and cultural belonging. These rhetorical strategies allow them to deflect attention from unpopular policy continuities and channel voter discontent away from economic grievances and toward external threats or internal scapegoats. The chapter argues that this populist turn reflects a calculated political adaptation rather than ideological transformation. It highlights how globalization not only reshapes the policy space available to democratic governments but also incentivizes new forms of narrative construction and voter persuasion, particularly among mainstream parties seeking to preserve broad electoral coalitions.

Chapter 7 examines a variety of claimed macroeconomic uses of CBDCs.

CBDCs could be used to carry out helicopter money drops. However, such drops can already be carried out in other ways, and the obstacle to using them is not implementing the helicopter drop, but the time needed to plan the distribution.

CBDCs could be used to implement a digital version of an ‘expiring money’ policy of the type first proposed by Silvio Gesell in 1891 to boost demand in a depression. This is a potentially promising policy in a depressive environment and evidence from the 1930s suggests that applied locally it has locally stimulative effects.

CBDCs could be used alongside the abolition of cash to help implement negative interest rate policies (NIRP). However, a NIRP is a tax in sheep’s clothing and empirical evidence to date suggests that such policies do not stimulate the economy.

CBDCs could be used to end fractional reserve banking, but there are other ways that do not involve CBDCs, and such a policy is questionable anyway.

We can define a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as a digital currency issued by a central bank to retail customers.

The main argument in this book is a simple one: that CBDCs offer no benefits to the public that cannot be better achieved using existing tools; at the same time, CBDCs entail substantial disadvantages and risks. These include the risks that CBDCs pose to the stability of the banking system, their inefficiency compared to private alternatives and especially the risks to civil liberties that come from giving the central bank an immensely powerful instrument of surveillance and control. In short, retail CBDCs would provide no tangible benefits and entail serious problems that could be avoided by not introducing a CBDC in the first place. The case for CBDCs should therefore be dismissed.

By contrast, privately issued digital currencies such as stablecoins should be encouraged as they offer potentially enormous benefits to the public.

This chapter shows that the CBD regime contains provisions on benefit-sharing, consent-like rights, and the recognition of indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs) that help implementing Indigenous rights to land, natural resources, cultural rights, FPIC, and self-determination, and complement protection thereof in the context of biodiversity protection. This contribution also argues that the CBD regime gives rise to four new categories of collective rights of Indigenous Peoples that are not (fully) protected under IHRL: the right to benefit-sharing, the right to genetic resources, the right to traditional knowledge (TK), and biocultural rights. These rights bear a good potential for additional protection of collective rights because they apply to situations that would otherwise not be covered under IHRL, illustrative being the entitlement to genetic resources. In terms of the theoretical contribution of these rights, this chapter demonstrates that the CBD legal framework contributes to reinforcing legal pluralism, by assessing Indigenous Peoples’ entitlements to TK and, indirectly, to genetic resources in light of Indigenous customs, practices, and procedures. The chapter concludes that Indigenous Peoples’ rights protected under the CBD framework do not perfectly coincide with the categories of environmental rights due to their main object and substantive nature.

When municipal elections favored republican candidates in 1931, King Alfonso XIII went into exile, and politicians declared a republic, polarizing Spanish society further. Republican programs included ambitious social, economic, and cultural initiatives to improve lives, but the government was faction-ridden from the start. Increasing street violence and several revolts persuaded a cadre of army officers to launch a coup in April 1936 that became a civil war when the government refused to yield. The Spanish Civil War, marked by atrocities on both sides, pitted right-wing Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, against an increasingly left-wing Republic. It ended after hundreds of thousands of deaths with Franco in power, tens of thousands of Spaniards in exile, and Spain isolated during the Second World War, supposedly neutral but sending troops to fight Soviet Russia in support of Nazi Germany. The postwar period brought misery, widespread hunger, and continued isolation that was only eased during the anti-Soviet Cold War of the 1950s. The following decade brought an economic boom and the relaxation of certain aspects of the dictatorship. By the time of Franco’s death in 1975, Spaniards were poised to enter a new epoch but wary about what it might bring.

CBDCs are a form of permissioned money that allows the issuer to control who, how and when that money can be used. Governments already have many ways to use access to bank deposits as a means of social control, for example to implement a lockdown.

Governments can use CBDCs to weaponise currency even further. The key is to control the public’s access to alternative payments media: forcing them to use a suitably weaponised CBDC would then give the central bank total control over all purchases made by everyone. The governing elite would then be able to punish at will those of whom it disapproved and impose their own agendas without being held accountable for how they exercise the arbitrary power that CBDCs give them. The resulting scope for social control has the potential to go well beyond the tyranny achievable by existing Chinese-style social credit systems.

The determination with which Indigenous peoples aim at protecting their traditional territories from environmental degradation emanates from their deepest spirituality and religious beliefs. The most effective means they have to avoid the deterioration of Indigenous territories is traditional ecological knowledge, which has already been recognized as critical in the combat against the environmental crisis. This traditional knowledge is an inextricable, constituent part not only of these peoples’ right to a healthy environment, but also of their right to freedom of religion or belief, all of which shows how in Indigenous worldviews traditional practices and knowledge systems are intertwined with belief systems. In spite of this, there is a worrying lack of understanding and operationalization of these peoples’ freedom of religion or belief, which hinders, in turn, the full realization of their environmental rights. With that in mind, and through an inductive approach, this chapter aims at exploring this connection while assessing the threats Indigenous religious identities and cultural survival are currently exposed to as a consequence of environmental degradation, so as to provide critical guidelines on the way forward, which must necessarily build on securing the full and effective participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental action and policy-making.

The Coda takes stock of the book’s argument for the distinctiveness of persuasion among its lexical and cognitive others in Romantic writing. It responds to some common misconceptions about the malleability of persuasion and considers its implications for our lives among others today, in political and professional community. The chapter suggests that one response to our civic polarizations, as well as to professional anxieties about the methods and future of literary studies, might well be the self-conscious and flexible mode of persuasion countenanced by Romantic writers at a moment of comparable entrenchments and attacks on the value of a creative and critical imagination. Rather than assume synonymy between persuasion and conviction, in other words, and dismiss them both as either so much domineering or else so much boundless subjectivism, we might consider the continuing value of the kind of judgment under uncertainty characteristic of persuasion as it was reimagined in Romantic writing.