The comparative public opinion survey “Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Script” (PALS) is part of the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)". The goal of PALS is to measure citizen attitudes towards what we call the liberal script, a specific understanding of how society should be organized around liberal principles. After having conducted a first wave in 26 countries from December 2021 to July 2022, conducting a second wave in some countries served the following purposes: 1. Re-running the survey with as many respondents from wave 1 as possible in selected countries to explore whether individual attitudes toward the liberal script have changed over time (panel data), 2. interviewing additional respondents from selected countries of wave 1 to be able to make statements about the change of public opinion in these countries (cross-sectional data at two points in time), 3. adding additional questions to address, in particular, the changing global situation with regard to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and 4. extending the geographical coverage to four new countries, namely, Thailand, Israel, Serbia, and Hungary which can be described as battlegrounds concerning the liberal script.

This essay explores ‘territories of accelerated development’ (TORs) to reconstruct the economic policy-making, development institutions and macroeconomic framework of late Putinism since the 2010s. It argues that even with Russia’s integration into the world economy and the developmental rhetoric of state elites, TORs and the national developmental regime around them reproduce the patronal management and recycling of rents rather than the transformative and state-permeated facilitation of productive investments and capitalist profits. This upscaling of rents has been systemic. The result—rentierism—challenges common understandings of rent-seeking and commodity rents as incidental features of Russian ‘state capitalism’, and, instead places them at the centre of a non-capitalist order of its own.

Does globalization increase polarization in attitudes toward international trade, immigration, and international organizations? Research from a variety of fields and disciplines assumes this relationship, but empirical studies are few. In this study, I examine whether globalization increases the attitudinal divide between education groups, with education being one of the main characteristics of social stratification distinguishing winners from losers of globalization. I use data from three waves of the National Identity Module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from 1995 to 2013 covering 29 countries (n = 79,101) to analyze between- and within-country interactions between the level of globalization and education in explaining attitudes toward globalization. The results show that while the attitudinal divide between educational groups is larger in countries with higher levels of globalization (between effect), polarization decreases as the level of globalization increases within countries (within effect), as persons with lower and medium levels of education become more positive toward globalization under increasing levels of globalization. The results are consistent across a wide range of robustness checks, including controlling for occupational class as a further distinction between winners and losers of globalization. The findings suggest that the expectations about a widening attitudinal divide between winners and losers of globalization should be treated with more caution.

The norms and institutions of liberal democracy, market economy, and open society have become increasingly contested worldwide. Is the rise of illiberal and authoritarian contestations reflected in a decline of citizens’ acceptance of liberal ideas and values? Are these contestations a response to unfulfilled promises, inherent tensions, or other unresolved challenges? As part of the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)", the comparative public opinion survey “Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Script (PALS)" provides data that lets scholars address these questions. The goal of PALS is first and foremost to measure attitudes towards what we call the liberal script. PALS was conducted in 26 countries (+50,000 respondents) using CAWI (quota sampling) and CAPI (random probability sampling) modes of data collection. The sample draws from a diverse set of countries to provide a global perspective.

This article examines the linkage of markets and democracy in the post-1989 Czech transition as a neoliberal populist discourse that delegitimized alternatives to the market as a return to authoritarianism. Using Laclau’s concept of equivalential linkages, I analyze Václav Klaus’ texts surrounding the voucher privatization program to determine how he formulated this linkage and communicated it to the public. Framing markets as natural, essential, and fundamentally Czech, Klaus constructed the people as a virtuous community of market individuals while othering those who opposed markets as communist holdouts and elitists. Klaus further legitimized marketization through identification with international neoliberal projects and thinkers. Through his moralized and dichotomized discourse, Klaus communicated to the public that there could be no freedom without markets, nor markets without freedom: a circular formulation that continues to influence Central and Eastern European political economy.

Finance plays a major role in discussions about state capitalism in emerging markets, but the focus has so far been on banks. Capital markets have been neglected. Moreover, findings from the growing literature on financialization in emerging markets indicate that in some cases there is increasing state involvement in the development and functioning of capital markets. Hence, the relationship between the state and finance in these economies may be fundamentally different from the picture provided by liberal Western-centric perspectives. Instead of looking at capital markets as uniform entities, we propose to analyse them as variegated – while characterized by common financialization processes, they can be informed by different institutional logics, leading to very different market dynamics and outcomes. We explore to what extent these differences exist and how state-capitalist economies facilitate capital market development. Our comparative institutional analysis of securities exchanges as central parts of capital markets in six increasingly financialized emerging market economies – Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Africa and South Korea – focuses on the degree to which capital markets are integrated into state-capitalist institutions. Instead of mere platforms on which market transactions take place, we analyse exchanges as powerful actors which actively shape capital markets. While in most advanced economies exchanges are situated within an institutional setting informed by neoliberal institutional logic, we demonstrate that exchanges in emerging markets often organize capital markets to facilitate state objectives.

Foundations provide key funds for nongovernmental organizations. We know little about what they do for transnational activism or the mechanisms via which they seek/achieve influence. We carve a middle ground between those who see donors as supporting actors in transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and those who think they distort activism through impersonal market forces. Our negotiation-oriented approach looks at the micro-dynamics of donor–grantee relations. We argue that influence is a function of donors’ organizational characteristics. Only some, especially foundations, have the vision/means to shape grantees. However, internal complexity can cause coordination problems, complicating influence. Additionally, if many donors exist, recipients’ leverage increases. It does so too if their expertise is in short supply. Using archival evidence, we reconstruct how Ford tried to shape the Inter-American Human Rights Institute, a pillar of the region's human rights regime, and the factors conditioning success. For Ford, the Institute could play a role in a fledging TAN, but only if it downplayed its emphasis on research and directly engaged activists. Coupled with analyses of USAID’s relationship with the Institute and Ford's relationship with Americas Watch, we shed light on the activities of an important class of donor and illuminate foundations’ role in the development of TANs.

While recent scholarship has turned to the increasing fragmentation of global human rights discourses, the often competing ideological projects in which different understandings of human rights are embedded have received comparatively scant attention. Instead, human rights are treated as isolated norms. Although treated as isolated, human rights norms are frequently simultaneously understood against the implicit backdrop of liberal assumptions about political order and human agency, thereby obscuring alternative human rights conceptions. This research note seeks to move our understanding of human rights beyond the liberal script. Drawing on advances in the fields of intellectual history and political theory, it develops a morphological approach that treats norms not only as individual standards of appropriate behavior but as complex units of meanings. These meanings only emerge in larger ideational formations in which varying notions of human rights are temporarily fixed through their positioning toward other concepts. This morphological understanding of human rights as part of larger conceptual arrangements allows for their analysis beyond the liberal script as the research note shows by way of two illustrative case studies, which focus on human rights beyond liberal notions of democracy and the rule of law as well as beyond the human as ontologically singular.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Eurosceptic contestation within the legislative arena of the European Parliament (EP) from 2009 to 2019. Under what conditions do Eurosceptics vote differently from their Europhile peers? The literatures on European integration, party competition and policy types lead us to expect variation in Eurosceptic contestation across policy areas. Drawing on roll-call votes in the EP, we introduce two new measures of such contestation: Eurosceptic dissent, that is, the extent to which Eurosceptics diverge from the Europhile plurality, and integration polarization, that is, the extent to which Eurosceptics and Europhiles oppose each other as cohesive camps. Our two indicators show that Eurosceptic contestation is particularly pronounced when the EP votes on cultural, distributive and constituent issues. When voting on redistributive policies, in contrast, dissent and polarization are curbed by national and ideological diversity.

After a failed transition to democracy in the 1990s in Togo, the opposition took refuge in Ghana, outside of the regime’s reach. Why and how did the regime react to transnational dissent? Analyzing an unpublished RPT-produced press review and the opposition press in Ghana and Togo, Raunet argues that the Togolese regime used the foreign press, the language of legality, and the politics of belonging to consolidate itself and shape a public image of apparent legitimacy. She suggests that the skillful adaptation of legitimation narratives is key in understanding the “internal logic” of authoritarian regimes and their prospects of survival.

Recent years have witnessed a rise in global investments in the digital economy. The growing digital reach of Chinese tech companies is responsible for at least part of this transformation. Yet, little is known about how host country citizens view China’s increasing stature in the digital sphere. Focusing on Chinese investments in mobile payment platforms (CIM), this article explains citizens’ levels of approval of Chinese outward investments in the digital economy. Based on online surveys conducted in four selected Southeast Asian countries – Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines – this research shows that citizens of these four countries perceive the benefits of CIM to outweigh the risks, with approval rates to be higher for Thailand and Malaysia, and lower for Indonesia and the Philippines. We find these high levels of approval for CIM to be significantly associated with perceived personal benefit, such as price reductions and an increase in purchasing choices. By contrast, country-level factors, such as geopolitical concerns about China, do matter in some contexts, but overall show less explanatory influence. These results shed light on citizens’ views of different types of foreign investments and of China, and support previous arguments on the separation between consumer behavior and politics.

This article introduces an analytical framework for studying and interpreting the sometimes surprisingly different ‘shapes’ (key topics and approaches) of donor-funded responses to sexual violence in and after armed conflict. Our framework highlights processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization and their influence on interventions. Drawing on available studies, published documents, and our own field research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone, we show that donor-funded responses to sexual violence since the early 2000s have taken remarkably different shapes – despite the emergence of influential international policy narratives and roughly similar forms of sexual violence in both contexts. A focus on context-specific processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization reveals how these differences came about and persisted over time. (De-)Politicization and technicalization of sexual violence as a ‘weapon of war’ in DRC have led to medicalized and security-centred statebuilding interventions in the county's eastern conflict zones. By contrast, donor-funded responses in Sierra Leone framed and addressed sexual violence as ‘domestic violence’ even before the war had officially ended. We find that these different shapes emerged from initial differences in (de)politicization and technicalization processes driven by different ‘first responders’ in both contexts, which created enduring path dependencies.

This article investigates the contribution of decolonising states to the nascent international order emerging after the end of World War II. More precisely, it investigates the Indian contribution to the emerging international human rights regime, focussing on two key contributions: the advocacy for a strong supranational authority endowed with substantial enforcement mechanisms for the realisation of human rights and the equally strong defence of a bifurcation of civil-political and socio-economic rights into two treaties. Both contributions have been largely ignored within International Relations – and where they have been acknowledged, they have been subsumed into either narratives of liberal progress (as in the case of human rights enforcement) or Cold War rivalry (as in the case of a separation of the two Human Rights Covenants). In contrast, this paper seeks to shed light on the agency of Indian diplomats and politicians. It shows how their positions were neither simply replications of pre-existing scripts nor bare executions of superpower preferences. Instead, they were responses to the challenges of becoming a post-colonial state in a still overwhelmingly imperial world. Two challenges stood out: the definition of citizenship in light of internal diversity and a widely dispersed diaspora and the challenge of development against the backdrop of highly unequal global economic relations. In this article, I trace the movement of key protagonists between the Constituent Assembly and the United Nations to show how they were engaged in a project of postcolonial worldmaking, which required the simultaneous transformation of domestic and international order.

In the context of the rise of right-wing populist parties in the past decades, many researchers have addressed the question of increasing social polarization and threats to social cohesion. In this article, we contribute to this discussion by looking at the cultural side of the globalization divide from the perspective of cleavage theory. More precisely, we ask if respondents interpret lifestyle characteristics as signals for the socio-political position of others and whether these attributions influence the willingness to interact socially. Based on data from a factorial survey experiment, we show that cosmopolitans categorize other persons based on different lifestyle characteristics and are more likely to interact with those who have a similar cosmopolitan lifestyle.

To justify surveillance measures and gain them public support, governments use the promise of security. It is usually claimed that individuals are more willing to have freedom and privacy restricted than waiving a promise of increased security. However, empirical evidence to support this claim has been scarce—especially from a comparative perspective. Focusing on surveillance measures, this paper shows that people do indeed express greater acceptance of restrictions when these are justified by promises of security, being one of the first to examine this across 29 countries on all continents. Based on data from the ISSP, it investigates to which degree the effect of a security-based justification is moderated on the micro and macro level, with surprising results: While the effect does not differ between different levels of government support and political orientation, it differs significantly depending on how liberal-democratic the country is. The effect of the security-justification is very pronounced in liberal democracies, while it is even reversed in rather autocratic countries, meaning that individuals seem to be rather suspicious towards security justifications in non-democratic countries.

Throughout the last decades, integration programmes in Western Europe have centrally revolved around debates on Muslim populations and the institutionalization of Islam. The concept of integration has become a master paradigm with which to structure plurality of immigration societies across Western Europe. Critically reflecting this inflation, this article argues that the integration of Muslims is animated by a contingent liberal-secular matrix through which the sovereign state, in close connection with civil society, is enabled to decide what counts as proper and improper religion. Integration directed toward Muslims as a “religious minority” is therefore indicative of the very problems that it purports to resolve. In a genealogical vein, the article begins by suggesting that integration is a liberal “recursion” of earlier projects of minority management such as assimilation and conditional recognition within emerging nation-states. It argues that the epistemological ground which animated the assimilatory forces of the modern nation-state has been intimately bound by an imperial knowledge order which classifies and hierarchizes people along a race-religion nexus. The analysis continues by dwelling on contemporary examples of state organized dialog with Muslims, and more specifically the establishment of Islamic Theology Chairs at state universities. Through these examples the article shows that the institutionalization of Islam in Europe reconfigures a pattern which conditionally embraces religious difference, while at the same time continuing hierarchical rankings and by transforming it to make it fit for religion's legitimate place in public life. Finally, the article suggests that the somatic aspirations prevalent in assimilation projects and imperial race-religion constellations are both inscribed and concealed in the frequent invocation of Muslims to reveal their loyalty to the liberal-secular contract by bracketing their religious sensibilities for the sake of secular reason.

The literature on global international relations (IR) has argued that the discipline develops in the footsteps of world politics, but no sustained attention has been given to more immediate causes such as the funders that pay for IR teaching and scholarship. These donor–recipient relations have only attracted the attention of authors interested in cultural hegemony and those contributing to the recent historiography of IR. Among the latter, some have studied how during the Cold War the Rockefeller Foundation attempted to buttress classical realism in the United States and Western Europe. This article connects and moves forward IR historiography and the global IR literature by shedding light on philanthropic foundations’ attempts to further a specific IR theory—classical realism—and area studies in the global south. The article argues that world politics influenced global IR, but this influence was mediated by highly contingent events. Even a proximate cause like science patronage, let alone “world politics,” is not a sufficient cause capable of determining IR theories and disciplinary boundaries. Donors may achieve some impact but only under specific circumstances such as the ones explored here, that is, the donor is a unitary actor determined to advance its agenda by resorting to conditionality, alternative donors and funding are scarce, the discipline is either poorly or not institutionalized, and the recipient perceives the donor's preferences as legitimate. The article uses previously untapped, fine-grained, primary sources to unravel philanthropy's impact on Latin America's first IR center. Because science patronage is exposed to many sources of indeterminacy and to contingency, donors cannot determine scholarship, which makes cultural hegemony all but impossible. Still, IR scholars need to study their patrons to understand their discipline, in and outside Europe and the United States.

While the historiography on the religious Cold War has tended to focus on Christian anticommunism, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sought to transcend the Cold War while simultaneously advancing religious freedom in the Soviet Union. This article connects the WCC's ecclesiastical diplomacy to the wider story of human rights, from which religion has too often been excluded. The WCC's quest for Christian fellowship led it to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church into its membership, but this commitment generated tensions with the rise of Soviet dissidence. Moreover, the WCC's turn towards the left and the Third World contrasted with newly ascendant voices for human rights in the 1970s: Amnesty International's depoliticised liberalism, evangelical anticommunism, and the Vatican under John Paul II. Thus, the WCC, an early and prominent transnational voice for human rights, ran afoul of shifts in both the Cold War and the politics of protest.

This Testify article features a conversation about the emancipatory potentials and pitfalls of girls empowerment as practiced, experienced, and judged by Sierra Leonean activists. We – two scholars and four activists – discussed views on and experiences of girls empowerment approaches that have been interpreted in critical scholarly literature as a form of neoliberal responsibilization. Also within this critical literature, there is often the notion that these approaches may yet create openings for emancipatory agency and counter-conduct. However, it remains unclear whether this happens and to what extent. Our conversation centres activists’ views on the academic critique of girls empowerment and raises a number of questions, including: Why do many feminist activists in Sierra Leone embrace girls empowerment approaches? What do they see in them? How do they interpret and practice them? Where do they see potentials and pitfalls? And what is the role of donors?