This article examines how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) rhetorically position themselves in relation to populism. Drawing on plenary speeches from 1999 to 2019, it shows how references to populism help define political opposition and set the boundaries of cooperation. The study finds that left-leaning MEPs often associate populism with the far right and anti-democratic threats, while right-leaning MEPs adopt more ambivalent or generalized framings. These patterns reflect both ideological orientations and the strategic outlook of political groups, especially as cooperation with populist actors becomes more politically feasible. By tracing how rhetorical strategies vary across the political spectrum, the article sheds light on how populism is negotiated within the European Parliament and underscores the role of rhetoric in contestation and coalition-building in this setting.

This article reconsiders the role of mechanisms in social science research. The study of mechanisms has been recognized as a fundamental task for a methodologically diverse range of social scientific approaches. This raises questions of what roles mechanisms play for causal explanations and if there are uses that are more reasonable than others. To address these questions the article, first, discusses competing arguments for the causal theory underpinning mechanisms. On the basis of these discussions the paper emphasizes the heuristic role of mechanisms as an explanatory devise, serving a crucial role for causal explanations. Secondly, it endeavors to explore the diverse ways mechanisms are employed, especially in contemporary political science research, to highlight limits and benefits with different approaches. The discussion helps reconsider existing fault lines in debates over mechanisms, including the relationship between qualitative and quantitative techniques in empirical research centered on mechanistic explanations.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

Weimar casts a long shadow over post-war political thought. The Weimar Republic is used to understand contemporary threats to democracy and to critique or defend modernity. It has generated a series of political lessons that are invoked whenever democracies are challenged. This book questions the historical validity of most of these lessons and their applicability to contemporary political orders. It shows how Weimar lessons are often influenced by partial and superficial readings of events, often intended to advance particular political projects. The chapters give detailed accounts of how so-called Weimar lessons have influenced, if not shaped, political debates in Germany, elsewhere in Europe, and the United States.

In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on European politics, this collection explores how dilemmas associated with key democratic concepts can be understood in relation to the EU. The book renews our understanding of EU democracy in ways that are more attentive to the multiple fault lines and cleavages that structure this political order. It focuses on a set of democratic dilemmas inherent to EU democracy, including representation, deliberation, sovereignty, citizenship, democratic contestation and market, to provide discussions on the specific tensions and trade-offs associated to a particular concept. The book engages in the theoretical groundwork necessary for assessing and analysing the specific dilemmas that arise when translating democratic concepts into concrete institutional designs in the European setting.

This article studies the response by public sphere institutions in democratic societies to far-right parties, focusing specifically on public broadcasting organizations in Germany and Sweden. With the upsurge of far-right parties these types of institutions are faced with difficult decisions on how to balance norms of inclusivity, impartiality and pluralism while also safeguarding substantive norms related to the protection of equal human dignity and non-discrimination. Public sphere institutions, and public broadcasting in particular, are of key importance for well-functioning democracies. They are also settings where democratic dilemmas appear that have received less attention in the existing literature on democracy's protection. We develop our contribution through a comparative study of the response by public broadcasting organizations to the far-right in Germany and Sweden. Results point to continuing difficulties in navigating dilemmas related to the response to these parties, especially as they are becoming an increasingly normalized part of the political landscape.