This article addresses political-party organization in Estonia, especially candidate selection. Its first objective is to describe the ways in which the main parties chose their candidates before the 2011 parliamentary election. A second objective is to evaluate those procedures in light of expectations generated by established theory. The focus is on two conditions: the institutional framework, particularly the electoral system, and the relative youth of Estonian democracy. The evidence confirms these expectations only partially, which suggests that an individual party’s ideological, organizational and strategic circumstances, in addition to structural and institutional conditions, are critical to understanding why it performs this basic function as it does.

Tara Zahra maintains in her article 'Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifferenceas a Category of Analysis' that many people in the early twentieth century were indifferent to the call of the national movements or oscillated between different national belongings. While finding Zahra's perspective relevant, this article criticizesthe choice of her central analytic concept,'national indifference,'and also questionsthe absence of an integrated gender perspective. Finally, the article queries the general applicability of her theoretical approach. While useful in the analysis of demotic national movements, it is considerably less so when studying elite minoritygroups. This becomes evident when Zahra's theoretical perspective is applied to the Baltic Germans.

The Baltic presidents have in common that they are supposed to embody the ‘nation’ and provide an image of their countries abroad. But can the president embody the people if ‘the people’ itself is divided? In this article, we will focus on public trust in the presidency between the majority and minority population in the Baltic states. Drawing on public opinion surveys, the aim is to examine the determinants of public trust in the presidential institution and support for the performance and principles of the political system as well identification with the political community itself. Among our findings, we conclude that ethnic or linguistic identity explains trust to a considerable degree, which suggests that trust is not only an expression of specific political support, but also part of a more deep-seated, diffuse support.

Surveys were conducted in ten schools: five in locations around the Baltic Sea and five around the Mediterranean. Students were asked to delimit the two regions on a map of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to assess how much they would like to live in each region, and to write down the advantages and disadvantages associated with living in each region. Students tended to describe the two regions in terms of a North–South dichotomy, describing the Baltic Sea region as cerebral, advanced, and wealthy, while culture, food, and climate were described as advantages of the Mediterranean region.

This article argues that transnational engagement offers political parties legitimacy and reinforces tendencies towards standardization. EU accession brought many parties in post-communist Europe into Euro-parties and political groups. In this context, national parties are expected to adhere and keep to certain standards. The case in point is the Estonian Social Democratic Party, which took back this name shortly before Estonia joined the EU. The article shows how this party has been seeking to develop into a modern European social democratic party by engagement in a range of transnational networks and activities and by embracing the organizational and programmatic ideals of its partner parties

Nation branding, as a phenomenon, is attracting increasing scholarly attention. However, much of the existing literature has been written by those involved in the public relations industry themselves. There have been some studies which have been written from a critical viewpoint; however, the tensions of branding a nation have often been neglected. This paper aims to explore the inherent tensions between nation branding and nation building. To what extent is nation branding a tool or a practice? What images of the nation do branders seek to promote, and who is this image for? Is nation branding merely a more palatable version of nationalism? In particular this paper focuses on the debates surrounding the launch of Brand Estonia in 2001/2. Brand Estonia, with the slogan Welcome to Estonia: Positively Transforming, was launched to coincide with Estonia staging the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002. It is a unique and interesting case study given the level of controversy that the initiative generated amongst the Estonian public. Estonia was the first Former Soviet Republic to launch a nation branding project and, perhaps more controversially, it was managed by a British-based company, Interbrand. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to public-level discourses concerning Brand Estonia. The empirical findings discussed in this article highlight some of the more salient narratives on national identity that Brand Estonia engendered and therefore aims to fill this gap.

The Baltic refugees of the Second World War, in Sweden, were part of the opening up of Sweden to immigration. New research, after the turn of the century, has shown how this change of policy was part of the emerging welfare state, embracing a wider geographical area. Still, the opening was conditioned by degrees of Nordicness and the conditions of neutrality toward Germany and not least the Soviet Union. This review article highlights some of the new insights of Swedish historiography.

This article compares three popular explanations for changes in female employment in post-socialist countries: retraditionalization, reserve army of labor, and revalued resources. Although these explanations are complementary in many ways, the retraditionalization thesis seems the most accurate explanation. In the early 1990s, gender-role attitudes were highly traditional, a tendency that might have contributed to the huge decrease in female labor force participation. Despite the changes, the comeback of the male-breadwinner family model is unlikely, since the acceptance of women's working roles is rapidly increasing.