Scholars of deservingness emphasize the attitudes of host societies toward migrant communities and inter-ethnic stances of migrant groups but not in-group perceptions of deservingness. Based on interviews with Ukrainian citizens who received temporary protection in the Czech Republic and Poland after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we show that participants classified the fleeing

This paper empirically tests whether populists in power or economic wellbeing influence civil society and civic culture. It conceptualizes civic culture broadly by focusing on citizen mobilization and evaluation of both national and supranational political institutions. The longer populists hold government positions, the stronger their control over civil society organizations, affecting participation

Remittances following economic and wartime migration are behind the huge number of remittance houses and entire remittance landscapes that have grown up in Kosovo in recent decades. The houses emulate the style and comfort of the villas of European and American suburbia but also in many respects reflect the local life style, the traditional life of (joint) families, but also the dramatic changes that

Environmentalism and pro-environmental behavior are widely thought to correlate with political attitudes. In particular, both empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that left-leaning individuals have more favorable dispositions toward environmentalism and practices that are regarded as environmentally friendly. We test this hypothesis using election data from Hungary. The main novelty of our result

This article examines the appropriation of opposition policy proposals undertaken by the Czech minority governments led by Andrej Babiš and his technocratic populist party, ANO. The article defines policy appropriation and then assesses its theoretical and empirical underpinnings within the broader context of a technocratic populist government. This is followed by a discussion of Babiš’ premierships

The business service sector, of which call centers make up a large share, has emerged as an important driver of growth in central and eastern Europe. This article explores how young employees in call centers in Romania interpret their labor market positioning, how they engage with the structures that shape their working lives, and how they mobilize values to make sense of complex labor processes and

Building on Margaret Levi’s theory of fiscal contract (1997), this article argues that people are primarily motivated to pay tax by governmental legitimacy. According to Levi, the agreement assumes the provision of collective services which focus on the needs of society; if services respond effectively to public interests, taxpayers reimburse them with their taxes. Put another way, under the fiscal

This article analyzes the way in which traumatic memories of the Soviet past are communicated in Estonian- and Russian-language women’s literature published in Estonia. The representation of the past in these works does not support the claim that the collective memories of Russian and Estonian communities are antagonistic and incapable of “agreeing to disagree.” Focusing on women’s prose written in

The history of multinational East-Central Europe is increasingly viewed through a colonial lens. This article contributes to the ongoing discourse about the applicability of colonial frameworks by looking at the cultural connotations embedded in urban street names by dominant elites. Between the 1860s and 1914, street naming emerged as a tool for demarcating territories, asserting authority, and popularizing

Politicians whose political careers appear finished rarely make successful comebacks. Slovakia’s Robert Fico was propelled back to power when his party, Smer-SD, won the 2023 parliamentary elections and was able to form a coalition government. An election victory for Fico, however, seemed unthinkable in 2018 when he resigned as prime minister amid large-scale protests, and even more unlikely in 2020

This article explores radicalization processes among the Belarusian opposition-in-exile using resource mobilization theory. Drawing on the case of the post-2020 opposition, exiled in the European Union and recognized by the West as a privileged interlocutor and “legitimate representative of the [Belarusian] people,” it identifies the stages of its radicalization in response to repression in Belarus

This study explores gender differences in public issue salience—the relative importance that men and women place on various public issues—focusing on how assets like wealth, education, and marketable skills shape these priorities within the Czech social context. This study is rooted in Iversen and Soskice’s theory of assets as well as in the Iversen and Rosenbluth’s theory of political preferences

This article explores the lost history of the Olympia Traveller and Traveller de Luxe typewriters. Designed in Germany but manufactured in a once multiethnic town called Bugojno in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a thriving Yugoslav typewriter industry, these machines were once exported to all corners of the globe with more than ninety different keyboards. Sold throughout Yugoslavia

The rise of right-wing populism as a challenge to liberalism has two major explanations: cultural and economic. Cultural explanations must strike a balance between general mechanisms and specific conditions of concrete regions or countries. There is an argument that a large segment of the population in east central Europe has rejected liberalism because it sees liberalism as an alien implant from “the

To understand the political dimension of dissident legacies, we need first to understand the components that “made” the dissidents and follow their reconfiguration after 1989, leading to initial empowerment followed by gradual demise of the liberal post-dissident elite. Dissidence in the form that first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in central and eastern Europe constituted a particular

During the 1980s, Catholic dissidents in Slovakia constructed divergent modes of moral reasoning. While national democratic Catholic dissidents looked to universal Catholic morality, nationalist Catholic dissidents anchored their moral reasoning in nationalized ethics. Their respective modes of moral reasoning were crucially formed in the making of national Catholic memory. If both appreciated Slovak

This article’s central question is how former dissidents and their engagement in post-1989 nascent democratic politics contributed to the emergence of what was later retrospectively labelled the “liberal consensus.” I look at the earliest stages of this consensus before it started to lock in the conditionality of the EU accession process. To this end, I first discuss the “liberal consensus” from a

A playwright, philosopher, and president, Václav Havel was well known at home and abroad for all his “careers” and contributions. This article compares and contrasts the recognition accorded to Havel at home and abroad, examining differing assessments and aspects of his legacy—his key contributions to politics, history, and the history of ideas. Within the Czech Republic, we refer to processes and

Several central and eastern European countries have experienced democratic erosion of different kinds. While the Czech Republic and Poland have faced democratic backsliding, for example, others, such as Bulgaria and Romania, are better characterized as struggling with democratic stagnation. Regardless of the type of democratic erosion, robust protest movements have challenged democratic erosion. What

The aim of this article is to research the economic preparedness for EU integration—or “integration maturity”—of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, the three countries that have signed Association Agreements with the European Union. A major part of these is the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements, which offer significant access to the EU single market and provide a pathway to deeper economic integration

If third-wave democratization propelled gains in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual, and pansexual (LGBTQIAP) empowerment globally, does the contemporary wave of democratic backsliding imperil those gains? To what extent does the potential threat from such institutional erosion depend on the presence of right-wing populists in government, i.e., backlash? Can both threats

The paper analyses the impact of local demography on the electoral strategies of ethnic political parties. We focus on Hungarian parties in Slovakia and their tactics of fielding candidates in the 2014 and 2018 mayoral elections in 4,461 municipalities with competitive elections. We find that local demography is an essential explanatory factor concerning the strategies of ethnic parties. Our results

The main problem addressed in the paper is the relation between politics and administration. The authors try to answer if independent administration exists at the sub-national level in Poland. In a more detailed manner, the question is whether an acceptance of independent administration has been fostered by the dispersion of political power and the experience of participation in important decision-making

This article investigates the use of sound at mass rallies during World War II, a topic that has not been explored in depth. By using the concepts of sound memory and soundscape, the article examines how contemporary literature represents past war events, specifically focusing on how national groups and individuals are portrayed in relation to other people, places, events, and axiological systems.

This paper presents a comparative study of cities’ migration policies. By comparing four bigger and four smaller Polish cities and their approaches towards Ukrainian war refugees, we show the differences in support offered by bigger and smaller towns. Polish cities wholeheartedly and spontaneously welcomed Ukrainians fleeing their country after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While

Compared to the scholarship on general political trust, relatively little attention has been paid to institutional trust. Research on the subject tends to treat political institutions as single entities, ignoring the fact that different institutions can enjoy, in the long term, very different levels of trust. This paper builds on the assumption that institutional trust may be formed differently depending

This article asks if the measures of human capital, ethnic diversity, and gender equality from 1930 explain current levels of human capital in Romania, while also assessing the role of macro-regional differences in the manifestation of historical legacies. We focus on human capital, measured by educational attainment and by conscientiousness, a personality trait we estimate using a behavioral measure

hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines was not particularly high in Romania at the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Nevertheless, the country became one of the laggards in the European Union in terms of vaccination rates. We aim to provide an empirical explanation for this phenomenon based on a representative survey conducted in November–December 2021. We test the influence of various factors on

The study examines whether kumivstvo, godparenthood, with its, with its moral and spiritual cultural heritage in Ukrainian society, provides normative power from the bottom up rather than top down for maintaining solidarity in a polyethnic society in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A mixed methodology is employed, carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The

This article introduces and validates a Political Antagonism Scale (PAS) aimed at capturing politically motivated antagonism among people in survey research. Recent trends indicate a rise in politically motivated polarization across various countries. This polarization often transcends mere ideological distance, fostering an identity-based “Us” versus “Them” political perspective. Consequently, this

In what ways do amicus curiae or friend of the court briefs shape the decisions of constitutional courts outside of the United States? Using a unique data set of more than nine hundred briefs from ...

This article examines Polish underground publications (samizdat) interpreting Ukraine’s role in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. The research analyzes a large number of underground journals, newspape...

The aim of this article is to analyse the archival collection of the memoirs of officers of the Polish security forces (Security Office and Citizens’ Militia) on their service in the Warsaw voivode...

The aim of this article is to study the translation of Polish literature into Slovene to shed light on Polish literary (and cultural) diplomacy in Slovenia. Being acquainted with the culture of ano...

This article addresses the candidate selection process for realistic list positions with regard to multiple-office holding and personal characteristics in flexible-list proportional representation ...

In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. ...

This article shows how Forum Against Depression,1 an online platform devoted to depression, creates awareness on depression in Poland. This qualitative study uses critical discourse analysis to int...

Bosnians show little faith in their state-level institutions, and with good reason, as the country ranks poorly on measures of corruption, regulatory quality, and government efficacy. However, the ...

At the end of the nineteenth century, European social democracy founded acceptance among some circles of the Bulgarian intelligentsia. However, the social base of this new ideology, including indus...

As the importance of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) has grown significantly in Europe, with some even forming governments, the attendant political and policy programs are attracting greater att...

Academics usually look for constitutional conventions in Westminster-style democracies, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. Nevertheless, growing evidence from practice shows that con...

Despite the significant body of literature on migrations after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, including on social remittances, a subcategory—political remittances—is only now...

National fragmentation of Slavic Muslims in the Montenegrin area of the Sandžak region into Bosniaks and national Muslims was recorded in the last two population censuses in Montenegro, with minor ...

This article explores Western donors’ support for the decentralization reform in post-Euromaidan Ukraine prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, with a focus on the re...

In this article, we investigate what kind of institutions affect bank ownership transformations in a post-transition economy. We use statistical data concerning mergers and acquisitions in the Poli...

Even if political parties have new labels, they often can be perceived as a continuation of an earlier existing grouping. The main goal of this article is to discuss how to assess party novelty and...

The existing research on contextual sources of support for populist parties has revolved around two factors: the unemployment rate and the size of immigrant groups. Conceived as residential charact...

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroye...

The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, wh...

The shrinking of civil society—a problematic trend in a growing number of countries—often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/o...

This paper reassesses Russia’s policy vis-à-vis the Western Balkans in terms of its pursuit of status. The region has been historically significant to Russia. It saw centuries of interaction betwee...

Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. While home in such texts often invokes childhood and family, in the contex...

Focusing on coexistence in towns and villages of the former Šariš Zemplín County during World War II, our article exposes the shifting meanings assigned to belonging in what was a multiethnic borde...

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová.This article argues for using personal accounts in recon...

This introduction highlights the analytical potential of “belonging” for those studying the social processes of Jewish exclusion in the Holocaust. It does so by proposing a tripartite definition of...

“This was my rudest awakening that I was Jewish. I was not Polish, I was horrified!” Cesia Honig, from Tarnów, perceived herself as a Polish patriot until 1938, when she was insulted for being a Je...

Life under Stalinism in the 1930s challenged Jews, particularly the young, with innumerable compromises to their religious and ethnic identity, yielding unexpected responses during World War II and...

This article focuses on a cluster of institutions rooted in Polish rural life that were co-opted by the German authorities into the lowest level of rule in occupied Poland from 1939-1945. It identi...