Note from the Editors

Welcome to the August 2022 issue of Politics & Policy (P&P)! In this issue, we offer a strong and varied lineup of original research articles on issues ranging from democracy indicators to economic voting, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), cannabis reform, pensions, energy democratization, the pandemic and borders, economic security in Ukraine, and the Dakota Access Pipeline, right up to Trump's tweets on immigration. We open with Zafirovski's (2022) ambitious, detailed, and successful proposal (and empirical validation) for a new composite index of political democracy. This new index seeks to add more substance, detail, and nuance than hitherto afforded by the most widely used indexes such as the Polity V or Bollen Indexes or the World Governance Indicators. Zafirovski's comprehensive composite index not only covers a wider number of components and endeavors to offer more precision when measuring democracy. It is also intended to be responsive to calculations for types of society or comparative social systems as well as for ranking individual polities. Next, Okolikj and others (2022) add to our past P&P articles on economic voting and party identification (see e.g., Dettrey, 2013; Fernandes et al., 2022; Stegmaier & Lewis-Beck, 2009) in their aggregate analysis testing whether partisanship is endogenous to the macroeconomy—and, thus, questioning the extent to which partisan bias contaminates voters' economic perceptions. They find that economic performance matters to those who identify with a political party primarily when it governs and its policies can be blamed for the economic outcomes. The suggestion here is that governments that fail to produce economic progress will likely face party supporters willing to defect. The next two articles center around the NPF and social media policy narratives. Boscarino (2022) compares the influence of textual versus visual narratives on public opinion and examines if individuals responded differently to them in the case of Twitter narratives related to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Merry (2022) uses the NPF to explore Trump's tweets on immigration policy and reveals their distinctly strategic nature. Lévesque (2022) examines the framing of morality policy in his excellent piece comparing debates about cannabis policy reformulation in the United States and Canada. His findings that moral frames were less important than epistemic ones challenges views of morality policy as a distinct policy subcategory—or at least encourages us to think about the discourse on cannabis as less about “right and wrong” and more about “true and false” in a post-legalization landscape. Contributing to the journal's growing batch of articles specifically discussing pensions in divergent contexts (see e.g., Angelaki & Carrera, 2015; Hazakis, 2015; Jakee & Stacy, 2021), Geri and Villareal (2022) look at the case of pensions in Argentina. The authors expose the myth of economic incentives in the case studied and contribute sound data and insights from Latin America to the debate on the design of optimal pension systems. While our next article was submitted to P&P before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Somych and others' (2022) detailed study of economic security in Ukraine remains as pertinent as it is wide ranging. The article provides valuable information about Ukraine useful to comparative politics scholars and all who wish to deepen their knowledge of the country. However, a major strength of this article lies in its discussion and comparison of Ukraine to many other countries, largely from Europe, in terms of their rankings on development, progress, democracy, and a host of other indexes. Heo (2022) brings the participatory democracy perspective very fully into view in her analysis of South Korean energy democratization. The author demonstrates that, while citizen participation in policy making was posited as a central tenet of South Korea's energy policy, in practice that participatory vision was little more than a formality. Both participatory democracy and several facets of the energy policy suffered as a result. Moving to questions surrounding economic reforms and political consensus, Jouini and Akal (2022) assess Tunisia since the Arab Spring (see also Gazdar et al., 2021) in terms of economic policy. They find that consensus had a subversive effect on democratic institutions in Tunisia by creating informal processes that effectively reduced public oversight, transparency, and law enforcement. Our final article this August applies Giorgio Agamben's concept of “state of exception” to migration at the U.S.–Mexico border during the COVID-19 pandemic. Garrett and Sementelli (2022) argue rigorously that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an ideal environment for creating states of exception in which the human rights of asylum seekers, refugees, migrants, and their children can and have been violated. They also argue that Trump's and, to a lesser extent, Biden's immigration policies have simultaneously destabilized the Mexico–U.S. border through the politics of fear—with far-reaching implications for sovereignty, legitimacy, and hegemony. As always, we hope you enjoy the ten articles in this issue of P&P and look forward to your continued article submissions at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/polpol.

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