This article examines how European Union member states organize governmental oversight for human-rights governance: the institutional machinery that assigns ownership, coordinates across ministries, and routinizes monitoring, follow-up, evaluation, and participation between international review cycles. Drawing on a systematic comparative coding of official state instruments across all EU member states, it maps domestic governance architecture as a carrier of diffusion and develops a typology of four dominant forms: cross-cutting national plans, framework strategies, fragmented thematic regimes, and thin/implicit compliance arrangements (plus a transition category). The analysis shows limited convergence despite shared supranational obligations. Only a small minority institutionalize a cross-government policy cycle with explicit accountability and participation devices, while most rely on dispersed sectoral instruments or minimal architectures anchored primarily in baseline legal safeguards and external review processes. The findings show why diffusion can be extensive at the level of commitments yet weakly routinized in domestic administration - clarifying why "having obligations" does not necessarily translate into "having routines."
This study examines how healthcare access for people living as undocumented migrants has been constituted, contested, and reconfigured in Sweden from the early 1990s to the mid 2020s, challenging institutionalist claims that universalist welfare systems reliably generate solidaristic migration policies. Drawing on a longitudinal policy analysis combined with critical framing analysis, we traced legislative debates and policy outputs across more than three decades, identifying four critical turning points: the 1990s framing of "undocumentedness" as an issue of migration control; the growing influence of human rights and public health arguments in the 2000s; the 2013 reform introducing legally ambiguous restricted inclusion; and the post-2022 recentering of healthcare within an expanded migration control and border enforcement agenda. The findings demonstrate that Sweden's universal welfare orientation structured, but did not determine, policy outcomes. Expanded inclusion emerged when humanitarian, public health, and legal frames aligned across party coalitions, while restriction dominated when deservingness and control arguments converged with fiscal and capacity concerns. Civil society actors and clinicians played a crucial role in sustaining rights-based frames, but without decisively shaping subsequently implemented policies. In conclusion, solidaristic healthcare policies addressing undocumented migration depend less on welfare state design than on shifting political alignments. Policy implications include decoupling healthcare from border enforcement, as a means of maintaining the ethical legitimacy of the welfare state, along with a need to integrate clinical expertise into policymaking.
Why do dysfunctional power-sharing institutions persist in divided societies despite recurring crises? Drawing on an original conjoint survey experiment in Lebanon, this paper argues that support for institutional change is shaped not only by dissatisfaction with state institutions, but also by how citizens perceive the risks attached to institutional alternatives. It distinguishes between vertical risk, rooted in distrust of state institutions, and horizontal risk, rooted in fear of domination by rival sectarian groups. The analysis yields three main findings. First, higher vertical risk is associated with stronger rejection of power centralization. Second, horizontal risk points in the same direction, though the evidence is more tentative. Third, and most importantly, when both risks converge under Dual-High conditions, citizens' preferences shift qualitatively. Institutional safeguards such as stronger electoral oversight, which might otherwise be seen as neutral improvements, can be reinterpreted as instruments of rival advantage, while military correction of government mistakes becomes relatively more acceptable as an exceptional corrective device. The paper describes this logic as avoidant rationality and argues that it constitutes a micro-level mechanism through which crisis may reinforce institutional entrenchment rather than generate either political reform or authoritarian concentration.
Trust is an important component of information-seeking, particularly as related to the policy-making process. For policy-relevant information to be utilized by decision-makers and, in turn, impact policy, the information source must be viewed as trustworthy. Thus, understanding the origins of trust in sources of information regarding a particular policy issue is necessary in understanding the policy process associated with that issue. In this paper, I examine the origins of trust in information regarding hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"). Specifically, this paper examines the role of cultural value predispositions in shaping trust in information from various sources (e.g. energy industry, environmental groups, and government) regarding fracking. Further, the moderating role of perceived value congruence is examined. This study utilizes a survey of local policy elites in Arkansas (a state with fracking operations) and Oregon (a state without fracking operations). Findings indicate that, for local policy elites (1) trust in sources of information is largely derived from culturally held values, (2) the perceived compatibility of values between local policy elites' and those within their community impacts these relationships, and (3) the triadic relationships between cultural values, perceived value congruence, and trust in information sources are distinct between contexts.
