This general issue includes four articles: a comparative analysis of the performance of democratic regimes in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, a case study of the formation of the anti-corruption agency in Bulgaria, a case study of the meaning of a feminist Twitter hashtag in Turkey, and a bibliometric analysis of the literature on political socialization.
The first article, by Mălina Voicu and Simona Maria Stănescu, compares the performance of political regimes in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using statistical data on mortality around the world during the pandemic, the authors argue that COVID mortality is significantly lower in advanced democracies, indicating that democracies have some advantages (preparedness, ability to cope with disasters, health outcomes) that, by comparison to non-democratic regimes, allow them to minimize the mortality rate.
In the second article, Kristina Tsabala describes in detail the context that led to the approval of the Anti-Corruption and Illegal Assets Forfeiture Act in the Bulgarian Parliament in 2018. The author pays particular attention to the actors that were involved in the process, to their interactions and negotiations, and to the various strategies they employed, offering thus a comprehensive description of the creation of the legal mechanisms leading to the formation of the new anti-corruption agency in Bulgaria.
The third article, by Giray Gerim and Melek Aylin Özoflu, starts from a Turkish Twitter trend, #Erkekleryerinibilsin, as a case study of raising awareness about sexism in language, analyzing it through critical discourse analysis. The authors use this example within the larger Turkish historical and political contexts to show how Turkish women used the newly available media channels to draw attention to gender inequalities embedded in social, religious, and political norms, in an attempt to challenge the dominant patriarchal patterns.
The last article in the issue, by Xiao Yuanyuan, Liu Shuanghong, and Kamau Benson, uses bibliometric analysis on a dataset of articles on the topic of political socialization, extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection. The authors present their methodology for analyzing this particular type of data, focusing on co-authorship and citation patterns (at individual, institutional, and national levels). Using clusterization, they identify clusters of articles and then describe their defining characteristics and their evolution in time.
