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The continuous increase in the negative gap between biocapacity and ecological footprint has remained globally persistent since early 1970. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of foreign capital, domestic capital formation, institutional quality and democracy on ecological footprint within a global panel of 101 countries from 1995 to 2017.

The empirical procedure is based on data mix. To this end, this study uses a battery of testing and estimation approaches both conventional (no cross-sectional dependence [CD]) and novel approaches (accounting for CD). Among the battery of estimation techniques used, there are the dynamic ordinary least square, the mean group, the common correlation effect mean group technique, the augmented mean group technique, the Pooled mean group and the dynamic common correlation effect technique with the desire to obtain outcomes robust to heteroskedasticity, endogeneity, cross-correlation and CD among others.

The estimated outcomes indicate that using different estimators’ domestic capital formation consistently degrades the environment through an increase in ecological footprint, while institutional quality consistently enhances the quality of the environment. Further, the outcome reveals that, though foreign capital inflow degrades the environment, the time period is essential, as it shows a short-run environmental improvement and a long-run environmental degradation. Democratic activities show a mixed outcome with short-run degrading effect and a long-run enhancement effect on environmental quality.

Green investment should be the policy target of all economies, and these policies should be adopted to target both domestic capital and foreign capital alike. Second, the adoption of democratic practices will produce good leaders that will not just design short-term policies to blindfold the populace temporary but those that will produce long-term-oriented practices that will better and enhance the quality of the environment through the reduction of the global footprint. Equally, enhancing the institutional framework like respect for the rule of law in matters of abatement should be encouraged.

Although much research on the role of macroeconomic indicators on environmental quality has been done this far, democratic practices, intuitional quality and domestic capital have been given little attention. This research fills this gap by considering robust empirical techniques.

Recent academic studies, as well as media reporting, have devoted substantial attention to the ongoing “crisis of democracy.” Democratic “backsliding” of Central and Eastern Europe – sometimes referred to as an effort to establish a new system of “illiberal democracy” – is one of the most visible symptoms of this crisis. This narrative is supported by the quantitative metrics of democratic quality, reflecting professional community views on the appropriate criteria to define and assess democracy. However, once general public views expressed in the survey item of “satisfaction with democracy” are taken into account, the picture changes markedly. This chapter analyzes quantitative metrics reflecting expert community consensus and the general public assessment of the quality of democracy in the 27 EU members over the period 2010–2019. It documents substantial divergence between the perspectives of the experts and the general public – while expert-based indexes portray Central and Eastern European backsliding as the most significant trend in the EU democratic landscape, public opinion identifies a very different set of democracy's successes and failures. As experts and the general public fail to arrive at mutually accepted criteria of democratic performance evaluation, public debate has become futile. Meaningful discussion and systemic corrections have become unlikely, creating conditions easily exploitable by the populists, eager to frame it as an example of “elite” detachment from the “ordinary people”.

Contends that public service quality is necessarily a democratic concept. Because the public generally has no choice and/or is disempowered, dependent or excluded in relation to the services it is entitled to, quality, both in its technical and non‐technical dimensions, must be defined through bargaining. Different groups, including citizens and communities as well as individual consumers, need to be empowered to make their needs and desires known. For this, a new kind of organizational infrastructure and culture are needed. These look remarkably like those being developed in current models of decentralization. The key elements in both quality and decentralization are the three building blocks of front and back line (or centre), and, most importantly, the public. The service chain connects them. It is the maintenance of this chain which now needs to be the concern of front‐line managers, to sustain democracy and ensure a holistic and integrated response to need and quality development. Some recent research on decentralized managers reveals the kind of integrative, boundary‐crossing skills which will be relevant, indeed essential, in future quality developments.

Happiness levels differ among the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries and follow a downtrend, making such heterogeneity a popular topic to investigate. The paper aims to study the contribution of governance quality on the heterogeneity in happiness levels across MENA countries while controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables.

The paper applies panel random-effects regression analysis on three samples: full sample, rich and poor subsamples, using data from 20 MENA countries over the 2007–2017 period.

The empirical results for the full sample conclude that better technical quality of governance increases happiness in the region. Furthermore, findings suggest that political stability and absence of violence matters for people's happiness only in rich countries. Whereas, control of corruption is positively associated with happiness level in the full sample and poor subsample. Across all three samples, voice and accountability has no impact on happiness.

A possible limitation of the paper is using an index for happiness based on a subjective weight distribution. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to implement a novel method using data envelopment analysis.

This paper includes implications for policymakers in the MENA region. Governments should strengthen existing laws and create a comprehensive database of laws, fight corruption and prioritize raising income.

This paper is the first to categorize MENA countries into rich and poor to analyze how governance quality contributes to the heterogeneity in happiness levels.

Conducting research that is both practice- and theory-relevant is important for the service research community. Action research can be a fruitful approach for service researchers studying the transformative role of service research and wanting to make contributions to both the research community and to practical development. By exploring the current use of action research in service research, this study aims to make suggestions for enhancing the contribution to theory and practice development and to propose criteria for research quality for action research in service research.

This study builds on a systematic literature review of the use of action research approaches in service research.

The study makes three main contributions. First, it posits that any action research project needs to consider the four elements of problem identification, theorization, creating guiding concepts and intervention. Second, based on these elements mirrored in service action research, it outlines and analyzes three approaches to action research (i.e. theory-enhancing, concept developing and practice-enhancing). Third, it suggests a move from instrumental to a more conceptual relevance of the research and elaborates on the criteria for research quality.

This study contributes to the understanding of how action research may be applied for conducting high-quality collaborative research in services and proposes measures to enhance research quality in action research projects focusing services.

Political polarization and incivility manifested itself online throughout the 2016 US presidential election. The purpose of this paper is to understand how features of social media platforms (e.g. reacting, sharing) impacted the online public sphere during the 2016 election.

After conducting in-depth interviews with politically interested young people and applying deductive coding procedures to transcripts of the interviews, Dahlberg’s (2004) six normative conditions for the public sphere were used to empirically examine this interview data.

While some participants described strategies for productive political discussion on Social Networking Sites (SNS) and a willingness to use them to discuss politics, many users’ experiences largely fall short of Dahlberg’s (2004) normative criteria for the public sphere.

The period in which these interviews were conducted in could have contributed to a more pessimistic view of political discussion in general.

Scholars and the public should recognize that the affordances of SNS for political discussion are not distributed evenly between different platforms, both for the sake of empirical studies of SNS moving forward and the state of democratic deliberation.

Although previous research has examined online and SNS-based political discussion as it relates to the public sphere, few attempts have been made understand how specific communicative practices or platform-specific features of SNS have contributed to or detracted from a healthy public sphere.

This study aims to investigate the effects of mineral rents, conflict and population growth on countries' growth, with a specific interest in 13 selected economies in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper uses a combination of research methods: the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), the fixed effect and the system generalized method of moment (GMM). The consistent estimator (system GMM), which provides the paper's empirical findings, remedies the inherent endogeneity bias in the model formulation. The utilized panel dataset for the study spans from 1980 to 2022.

The study suggests that mineral rents positively affect countries' growth by about 0.407 percentage points in the short run. The study further demonstrates the long-run negative impacts of population growth rates and prevalence of civil war on economic growth. The empirical work of the study reveals that an increase in the number of international borders within the group promotes mineral conflicts, which impedes economic growth. Evidence from the specification tests performed in the study confirmed the validity of the empirical results.

Mineral rents, if well managed and conditioned on good institutions, are a blessing to an economy, contrary to the assumptions that mineral resources are a curse. The utilization of mineral rents in Sub-Saharan Africa for economic growth depends on several factors, notably the level of mineral conflicts, population growth rates, institutional factors and the ability to contain civil war, among others.

This study is the first attempt in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era to revisit the investigation of the impacts of mineral rents, conflict and population growth rates on the countries' growth while controlling for the potential implications of the qualities of institutions. One of the significant contributions of the study is the identification of high population growth rates as one of the primary drivers of mineral conflicts that impede economic growth in the states with enormous mineral deposits in Sub-Saharan Africa. The crucial inference drawn from the study is that mineral rents positively impact countries' growth, even with inherent institutional challenges, although the results could be better with good institutions.

Two extreme positions set the tone in learned literature on the feasibility of democracies in the information society. In the opinion of a number of authors, the widely proclaimed “electronic revolution” will inevitably take us to “direct democracy”. The only question these computopeans hold different views on is to what extent active steering of the further introduction of technology is necessary to reach direct democracy. Some of them (like De Sola Pool, 1983) are of the opinion that technologies of freedom are involved, which will almost automatically result in a more democratic society, provided that the free market is left to its own devices. Other authors believe that the new technology enables a drastic renewal of political culture and structure, provided that it is used deliberately in a practical and sensible way (Etzioni, Laudon, & Lipson, 1975; Becker, 1981; Hollander, 1985; Barber, 1988; Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988).

Previous literature has clearly demonstrated the need for sound government policies or “institutions” to promote and support entrepreneurship in a country. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of one such institution – political stability – in boosting entrepreneurial endeavors. A politically stable nation will have lower risk and transaction/contracting costs, and higher levels of government transparency, predictability, and accountability. Thus, the paper should expect that with greater political stability there should be a greater degree of entrepreneurial activity.

Using dynamic panel estimators (System GMM estimators) and considering multiple proxies of political risk, our results confirm this hypothesis. Such estimators handle challenges associated with panel data efficiently.

The paper's results show that greater political stability for a country does indeed lead to an increased rate of entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

Entrepreneurship is critical to the process of economic growth and development. To prosper, countries must unleash the creative talents of their citizens through the decentralized process of formal private sector entrepreneurship. New legal businesses create jobs, opportunities, wealth, and goods and services that make a nation grow. Sadly in many nations, this process is stifled and poverty is the result. While previous research has examined which types of specific policies matter for promoting entrepreneurship, the paper considers the different question of how the stability of political institutions impacts the rate of entrepreneurship.