The green transition is increasingly perceived as unjust by various stakeholders. Academic debates revolve around decarbonisation and coal phase-out legislation, the rush for critical minerals, new forms of renewable energy, regional strategies and the lack of effective coordination mechanisms, and policy gaps between economic and workforce development strategies and socio-ecological protections. Based on six case studies carried out between 2023 and 2025, this article identifies future vulnerabilities arising from the reproduction of intersectional socio-environmental inequalities in the EU’s just transition, thereby expanding the frame of socio-environmental justice (SEJ) through the lens of prospective environmental justice (PEJ). By centring analysis on the prospective production of SEJ and creation of green sacrifice zones, PEJ encourages scholarship and policy to confront the cross-sectoral and structural inequalities that green transition policies, as expressions of green capitalism, often inherit and amplify. We address a gap in comparative studies that empirically and qualitatively engage with the grassroots effects of the transition in Southern and Eastern Europe, discussing its structural conditions and evidencing place-based lived experiences. This article contributes to mapping prospective (re)vulnerabilisation in Europe’s green/just transition and the making of green sacrifice zones, wherein certain groups, identities, lands, and livelihoods are precast as dispensable in the pursuit of climate goals. Our contribution builds understanding of what it means to be made vulnerable in the technocratic shadow of the green transition in Europe’s periphery.
This article investigates the experiences with and expectations towards politics of Brussels-based youngsters living in socio-economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Drawing on six focus groups, we detail how young people understand political representation—whether, how, when, and by whom they feel represented. The analysis centres on youth’s lived experiences with politics, analyses their conceptions of political representation, and unpacks the normative beliefs and expectations that underpin their accounts. Specific attention is paid to how Brussels youth articulate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, and whom they conceive as preferable descriptive representatives. In response to widespread feelings of misrepresentation, young people frequently put forward the figure of a “cultural broker”: a locally rooted intermediary expected to translate everyday community experiences of precarity and discrimination into political voice. Conceived as an alternative to conventional political actors—widely perceived as socially distant and insufficiently attuned to their lived realities—this figure nonetheless reproduces enduring dilemmas of representation related to selection, accountability, and legitimacy. Its appeal thus signals not participants’ rejection of representative democracy as such, but a demand for representatives who are socially proximate and experientially knowledgeable and can correct epistemic injustices.
Offshore energy infrastructures are becoming increasingly central to the low-carbon transition while raising pressing questions of resilience and security. Assets such as offshore wind installations, subsea electricity cables, and pipelines are exposed to a growing range of environmental, technological, and geopolitical risks, as well as cyber and physical threats. This article develops an analytical framework for the study of critical offshore energy infrastructure governance, combining two dimensions: modes of governance, ranging from public-led to private-led arrangements, and problem-framings, spanning threat-based and risk-based approaches. The framework is applied to the Italian case to trace recent institutional and policy developments in critical offshore energy infrastructure governance. Findings reveal an increasing securitisation of offshore energy infrastructures and a shift towards more public-led and threat-based approaches, alongside the consolidation of risk-based instruments focused on resilience and coordination with private operators. The article argues that these dynamics are shaped by path dependence: While the repurposing of existing institutional capacities enables rapid responses in an emerging policy field, it also contributes to fragmented governance arrangements and constrains the development of a more coherent framework. More broadly, the study highlights how competing governance modes and problem-framings shape critical infrastructure governance during the low-carbon transition.
This article explores the role of female political actors who mobilize gendered symbolic capital to advance illiberal populist agendas in contemporary Europe. Building on the concept of the populist skirmisher, we analyze women who act as combative and hypervisible disruptors of discursive norms. They engage in performative incivility—weaponizing confrontation, vulgarity, and taboo-breaking to command attention and push ideological boundaries. Focusing on emblematic figures: Poland’s Ewa Zajączkowska-Hernik and Hungary’s Dóra Dúró, we examine how these women operate through gendered repertoires of moral defense and cultural warfare. We argue that these women embody skirmishing femininity: a strategic mode of political agency that fuses protective traditionalism with disruptive communicative practices. Here, motherhood and femininity do not soften aggression but authorize it as moral protection. Their confrontational performances help redraw the boundaries of acceptable speech and normalize radical discourse.
This issue brings together theoretical and empirical contributions that reflect the methodological, thematic, and conceptual diversity of contemporary political culture research. Moving beyond older divisions between quantitative and qualitative approaches, the issue demonstrates how political culture can be studied through multiple lenses, including political psychology, discourse theory, computational social science, feminist theory, regionalism, youth studies, trust research, memory studies, and digital activism. The contributions address key challenges of contemporary politics, such as democratic backsliding, populism, political trust, national identity, gender equality, migration narratives, digital communication, artificial intelligence, political participation, and regional political cultures. Collectively, the articles highlight the continuing relevance of political culture as an analytical framework for understanding how values, narratives, institutions, identities, and social practices shape political life. This thematic issue also reveals emerging convergences in the field, particularly the growing role of digital and computational methods, the influence of cultural and experimental political psychology, and renewed attention to democratic societies and their internal tensions. Overall, the issue seeks to stimulate further reflection on the evolving boundaries, methods, and future directions of political culture research.
Unequal electoral turnout between younger and older citizens has long been a topic of debate, and the size of this age gap differs from one country to another across Europe. Such cross-national variation has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature and thus raises the question of why some countries experience more severe representational failure in electoral turnout than others. A common interpretation is that younger citizens are depicted as apathetic, and their behaviour is intended to be read as a story of the absent generation from political life. While existing literature may show lower turnout among young individuals, attributing this solely to a lack of interest or engagement, it overlooks broader structural issues that may be at play. To move beyond this behavioural blame game, we analyse the relationship between political representation and the age gap in voter turnout using time-series cross-sectional data from rounds 1–11 of the European Social Survey. This research is built on the assumption that unequal participation is due not to a lack of interest in the public good but rather to the representative performance of institutions. Representative performance generally defines a set of descriptive and substantive forms of the representation that institutions are supposed to deliver a meaningful pathway to individuals to engage with electoral politics. Alongside other recent research, this work attempts to contribute to shifting the discourse away from the deeply rooted notion of absenteeism and toward a focus on the representation of institutions.
Political culture research originally assumed that political cultures existed at the level of the nation-state, and that any variations occurring below the level of the state served as a source of risk to the state. That state-centric assumption absolved researchers of identifying how one might identify political cultures. At the same time, a vibrant body of research on regionalism and regional political cultures offers different methods of explaining and measuring cultures that exist below the level of the state. This article offers a first examination of how we might identify the different territorial forms of regional political cultures, whether they have different features and routes, and if so what the consequences of this are for how we understand diversity within the state. It argues that there are two types of regional political cultures—hard and soft varieties—and that while measures of objective difference can help to identify different forms of regional political cultures, subjective elements, including the perception of difference, can offer a meaningful form of boundary-making around regional political cultures.
Youth policies in Europe have long aimed to enhance political, social, and economic inclusion. Yet young people remain vulnerable across key welfare dimensions, which can delay their transitions to adulthood and full citizenship. This study examines the political culture as shaped by trust in political and welfare-state institutions, interpersonal and social trust, and political engagement. It draws on data from the European Social Survey (2002–2023) covering the EU-28 countries, with a specific focus on young adults aged 18–29. A theory-driven hierarchical multiple regression was used, entering welfare state factors in Model 1; interpersonal, social, and individual characteristics in Model 2; and political power and activism variables in Model 3, all to explain trust in political institutions. The results show that satisfaction with welfare-state institutions is the strongest predictor of political trust, explaining 40.6% of the variance. Despite a low level of formal political participation, the findings indicate that structural and social factors—welfare satisfaction, interpersonal and social trust, and education—play a more substantial role in shaping youth political trust than direct participation. Overall, the results highlight that youth political culture is multidimensional and shaped not only by formal democratic engagement but also by institutional performance and social organisation.
Contemporary politics is marked by concerns about declining citizen satisfaction with democracy, falling political trust, and weakening democratic support. Scholars in this field often rely on the concept of political support but use its indicators interchangeably or inconsistently. Meanwhile, despite its relevance for democratic resilience, studies on its underlying structure remain scarce. Drawing on the foundational work of Easton and Norris, we derive expectations about the dimensionality of political support and the interplay among its various indicators. We test these expectations using factor analysis, item response theory models, random intercept cross-lagged panel models, and first-difference models applied to 29 waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study panel. As expected, specific support fluctuates substantially, whereas diffuse support is more stable, even though recent data show small declines in multiple indicators. Our results indicate that political support indicators form a one-dimensional latent trait. Along this trait, specific evaluations, like satisfaction with the government, differentiate respondents at higher levels of support, whereas more diffuse attitudes, such as institutional trust, best distinguish between those with below-average support. Longitudinal analyses reveal no evidence that changes in specific support systematically precede changes in diffuse support. Instead, changes in any indicator tend to predict subsequent changes in others, indicating self-reinforcing dynamics. Finally, first-difference models offer limited support for a buffering “reservoir of goodwill.” Prior levels of specific support neither amplify nor mitigate the effects of subsequent changes on more diffuse indicators. Beyond structural insights, our item response theory results provide important practical guidance for researchers when deciding between political support indicators.
The national language serves as a central instrument for communicating cultural differences and fostering a sense of identity among individuals. It is also employed internationally to project a favourable image of a state. Governments engage in activities to teach their language in foreign countries, although these practices vary according to each state’s cultural values and history. In the cases of France and Japan, both states have historically mobilised their culture as a tool for influence, albeit to varying degrees. While the status of French as an international language has long been integral to France’s diplomacy, the Japanese language does not benefit from the same global reach, despite the influence of popular culture on its international dissemination. Consequently, these two languages currently hold divergent statuses that affect their promotion overseas. This article aims to answer the question: How do France and Japan instrumentalise language as a tool for projecting national identity? For this purpose, this study investigates how the historical traditions and legacy of both languages influence these policies and how decision-makers legitimise them through explicit or implicit references to identity. Whereas the mobilisation of the French language explicitly advances a universal objective and relies on specific cultural values, Japan constructs its discourse around the principle of mutual understanding, presenting Japanese as a means of gaining the trust of foreign audiences.
This article advances a normative conception of political culture that resists its conventional treatment as a sociological fact. Instead, it proposes to understand culture as a generative field of norm production. Bridging normative political theory and cultural sociology, the argument demonstrates that culture, far from being a secondary reflection of political structures, performs constitutive work in shaping democratic imagination. Drawing on authors such as Saidiya Hartman and David Hebdige, the article highlights the power of aesthetic forms to translate private sensibilities into collective experiments in innovating political culture. Ultimately, it calls for a normative rehabilitation of culture as a site of democratic invention: a medium through which new values, solidarities, and institutional possibilities emerge. Rather than theorizing political change as a product of disruption or revolution, the article situates it within everyday creative practices that challenge treasured identities.
Political accountability depends on citizens’ ability to critically evaluate institutional performance and bestow trust accordingly. Such evaluative judgments require both cognitive skills to process political information and normative standards against which institutional behavior is assessed. While adults’ trust is known to respond to institutional performance, it remains unclear whether similar evaluative mechanisms operate among adolescents, who are still maturing cognitively and politically. Drawing on developmental psychology literature and evaluative theories of political trust, this study examines how adolescents’ political trust is shaped by macro-level institutional quality and individual-level cognitive and normative resources. Using multi-level moderated mediation models and data from the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, covering 14-year-olds across 24 countries (N = 82,321), the study provides the first cross-national test of the evaluative nature of political trust in early adolescence. The results show that institutional quality influences political trust entirely indirectly through performance evaluations, with stronger responsiveness among adolescents with higher civic knowledge and stronger democratic norms. These findings demonstrate that political trust among emerging citizens reflects not only traditional socialization but also adolescents’ own appraisal of political institutions. The study advances theories of micro- and macro-level political socialization and highlights the importance of cognitive and normative resources in the early development of political trust.
Can social media spaces host sites of memory (or, as Pierre Nora called them, lieux de mémoire, and how do user congregations at such sites evolve? This article examines a decade-long collection of tweets about the International Holocaust Remembrance Day to investigate how digital sites of memory are produced and evolve on platforms like Twitter. By applying computational text analysis to operationalize the definitional features of a site of memory, the study explores the discursive composition of the Holocaust Remembrance Day as a memory site, the evolution of the site’s relevance over time, and the user dynamics that shape this composition online. As part of this exploration, we introduce the idea of protean memorialization, a form of digital memorialization characterized by changes in the discursive composition of a memory site, but not its relevance. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our work and directions for future research.
Generalized trust refers to individuals’ trust in members of society at large. Previous research highlights negativity bias as a central obstacle to trust development: trust is easily destroyed but difficult to build. Yet, most evidence for this bias comes from Western, individualistic contexts. This study examines whether such findings generalize to collectivist settings. Using a preregistered online experiment in China, I show that negative information about others’ untrustworthiness lowers generalized trust more than positive information raises it, which indicates a clear negativity bias in the Chinese setting. The experiment also includes a cultural priming manipulation designed to test whether making collectivistic versus individualistic considerations salient moderates this asymmetry. The preregistered analyses, however, do not reveal a statistically significant moderation effect of the priming on negativity bias. I discuss the implications of this null result and outline directions for future research on how cultural value orientations may shape negativity biases in generalized trust.
This article seeks to emphasize the key aspects of the relationship between social and humanities sciences and employability culture by (a) examining global trends, shifts, practices, and challenges; (b) emphasizing the Greek context; and (c) assessing pertinent factors at the University of Crete. The objective is to pinpoint effective approaches, as well as the prevalent global difficulties and obstacles, while also evaluating the present state of play, concerning the employability culture of recent graduates (both Greek and international graduates) in the social and humanities sciences and the possible effects on their future perspectives. Employability culture is compared and analyzed in contrast with employment to show the differences between the two terms and their outcomes in society. The employment landscape of these graduates and their employability profile are analyzed through empirical data and relevant public policies. Based on international experiences, valuable insights and policy recommendations are provided to ease the integration of graduates into the labor market and address societal issues, such as unemployment, employment insecurity, and vulnerability. These insights are developed by examining the various facets of social sciences and humanities graduate employability culture and the relevant public policies designed to enhance it.
This article develops a conceptual framework that synthesises post-structuralist discourse theory, affect theory, and narrative political theory to analyse how political actors deploy crisis narratives to shape political imaginaries and moral boundaries by structuring discourses of solidarity and exclusion. This framework proposes three interrelated narrative mechanisms as heuristics for understanding how solidarity is narratively mediated, contested, and reimagined. It focuses on forced migration as a significant arena of contestation, showing that political narratives do more than describe events—they delineate individuals’ belonging to specific groups, identify those entitled to assistance, and categorise others as threats. The article conceptualises crises as affectively charged and discursively produced, reshaping imaginaries and political subjectivities. Through a critical reading of political, philosophical, and literary texts that address forced displacement—one of the most politically charged and morally contested issues of our time—the article identifies three interrelated narrative mechanisms through which solidarity is constructed or foreclosed: (a) security scripting, which frames migrants as threats and legitimates sovereign control; (b) affective national belonging, which ties moral responsibility to cultural or territorial identity; and (c) transnational vulnerability framing, which invokes shared precarity and interdependence to sustain post-national solidarities. The framework contrasts dominant, state-centric narratives—mobilised by sovereigntist actors to reinforce exclusionary identities—with counter-narratives emerging from grassroots solidarities, humanitarian imaginaries, and critical transnational discourse. By situating these dynamics within broader debates in international political theory and critical international relations, the article contributes to understanding how solidarity is narratively produced, contested, and reimagined in an age of displacement and fractured belonging.
This study extends a three-stage framework of the digital resilience building process into the domain of hypermediated political crises by using US’ TikTok ban as a critical case. Drawing on non-engagement observation of the event and systematic analysis of empirical materials, we adopt a contextualized political analysis to examine how “TikTok refugees” absorbed shocks, adapted to risks, and ultimately transformed their digital political/apolitical practices under this hypermediated crisis. In this process, RedNote natives, initially apolitical and seemingly “pure” social media users, were drawn into a playful and ironic form of digital carnival triggered by the influx of “TikTok refugees.” As the event unfolded, interactions between the two groups gradually shifted from early stages characterized by gamification and entertainment toward exchanges centered on everyday life and connections through high-cultural and artistic practices. Through this organic evolution of a media activism event, digital resilience deepened into a form of affective solidarity. Consequently, “TikTok refugees” and RedNote natives coalesced into a cosmopolitan discursive community, reactivating the openness and inclusivity that once constituted the “cultural genes” of the global internet. Beyond this case, we argue that the seemingly coincidental yet structurally inevitable diversity of their communicative practices reflects a broader geopolitical context in which global citizens, through bottom-up resistance and “the power of organizing without organizations,” subtly challenge and reconfigure a long-standing, state-centric international political–cultural order. This challenge does not operate through overt political confrontations but rather through micro-level, depoliticized, everyday communicative practices rooted in civil and interpersonal interaction.
Transnational consumer boycotts have become increasingly visible forms of political expression, particularly in digitally mediated contexts where individuals mobilize consumption choices in response to conflict-related events. While existing research has examined political consumerism broadly, empirical studies analyzing the motivational framing of youth participation in contemporary boycott movements remain limited. This study examines how young people discursively frame their participation in consumer boycotts related to the Gaza war within digital environments. Drawing on a corpus of 4,670 English-language social media posts published between January 2024 and October 2025, the study employs BERTopic modeling and qualitative frame analysis to identify dominant motivational frames in youth-led boycott discourse. The analysis focuses on how political participation is justified, legitimized, and communicated through digital narratives. The findings reveal a set of prominent motivational frames through which youth engage with consumer boycotts, including perceived institutional inadequacy, moral-humanitarian justification, transnational solidarity, and market-based accountability. Across these frames, emotional expression plays a central role in amplifying political meanings and facilitating collective alignment in digital spaces. The study demonstrates how consumer boycotts function as a discursive form of political participation for young people, where market behavior, moral expression, and digital communication intersect. By foregrounding framing processes, this research contributes to scholarship on political consumerism, youth political engagement, and digital activism, offering new insights into how political meanings and collective motivations are constructed and circulated in networked public spheres.
Mainstream research in political culture treats democracy in a gender-blind way. Building on the feminist argument that democracy and gender equality are co-constitutional, we introduce a concept of gendered political culture and explore its contemporary manifestations. To this aim, we develop a typology of integrated and fragmented political cultures based on four attitudinal combinations (support for/opposition to democracy/gender equality). Using Austria as a crucial case study and a mixed-methods research design, we also test it empirically. Our findings reveal both promise and concerns. Focus groups show Austrians support both democracy and gender equality. Yet democracy is mainly understood through a gender-blind lens that invisibilizes structural inequalities. At the same time, quantitative analysis reveals the co-existence of distinct gendered political cultures. We find that 32% of Austrians hold beliefs consistent with an integrated democratic political culture, strongly supporting both democracy and gender equality. However, 35% have beliefs in line with a fragmented democratic culture. They support democracy but are ambivalent toward gender equality. Among those with authoritarian-leaning attitudes, 21% support gender equality, while 12% do not, offering evidence of fragmented and integrated authoritarian political cultures. Men, FPÖ voters, younger individuals, and less educated respondents are significantly less likely to hold beliefs consistent with an integrated democratic political culture. The prevalence of a fragmented democratic culture reveals vulnerability to anti-gender equality campaigns that accompany democratic backsliding. Gender-blind frameworks in political culture research mask this risk. Measuring support for “androcracy” systematically overestimates democratic resilience. To understand why/how/with whom de-democratizing attacks on gender equality resonate, one needs to gender political culture research.
This thematic issue on the politics of pro-poor policies in the Global South brings together 13 articles that centre on the importance of institutionalist analysis. We emphasise several institutional dimensions that are particularly important in relation to pro-poor policies: processes of social ordering and social reproduction, the exercise of power, mechanisms of rule, and notions and practices of citizenship and rights. Accordingly, in our call for papers, we identified four major sub-themes within this broader framing that hold particular importance for pro-poor policies and the outcomes of those policies: (a) different types of legal mechanisms, (b) the power, interests, and ideologies of rivalling political actors, (c) the constraints and potential solutions of institutional configurations, and (d) the evolution and diffusion of the pro-poor agenda. In working off these sub-themes, the collection of articles reveal several recurrent insights, such as the dysfunctionalities of targeting systems in most of the Global South; the fragmentation and incoherence that is typical of social protection and related policies and programmes; the tensions involved in donor promotion, oversight, and monitoring of social protection programmes; related to this, the contestations between popular universalistic aspirations versus the narrow residualism of programmes promoted by donors; and the fundamentally political ways that “pro-poor” policy is envisaged.
