This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of “the people” necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose “authoritarian populism” feeds on and reinforces anti-Black racial prejudice. The second is Peronism, which has an ambivalent relationship with race that promises to shed important new light on this classic case of populism. The third case is that of the American Populists, whose pioneering experiments in interracial politics remain an enduring illustration of populism’s progressive potential. In each case, we focus on a key document from that political regime/movement: the Conservative Manifesto of 1979, the Peronist Constitution of 1949, and the Omaha Platform of 1892. The article concludes that populism, as a logic of action, acts as a catalyst that intensifies whatever specific content is mobilised – racist and anti-racist content alike.

Although many return migrants had planned to go back to their country of origin, other return migrants who had originally planned to pursue the immigrant dream––the idea that one can have a better life by migrating—eventually change their mind and return to their society of origin. Just as the identity of individuals must adjust to the loss of a relationship, job, or membership of a group, many formerly aspiring immigrants give up on immigrating. I analyze data from oral history interviews and social media narratives of 121 Chinese ex-immigrants from 16 different countries. I show how disappointments, the language barrier, cultural alienation, racial-ethnic discrimination, intersectional-gender issues, barriers to upward socioeconomic mobility, and/or restrictive immigration policies interact with each other to constitute ex-immigrant subjectivity. This article highlights why immigration is a far less certain process than many perceive it to be, contributing to the broader sociological literature on how in different and similar ways processes of abandoning important social endeavors, like a romantic partnership, political party, or religious faith, transform subjectivities and social identities in other domains of social life.

This article reconstructs and analyses the conceptual history of “the people” [Folket] in modern Danish history. It applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze new data and archival materials and provides a detailed study of the construction, development and central role of populist conceptions of “the people” in the constitutional struggles between 1830 and 1920 that transformed Denmark from an absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. I argue that these populist conceptualizations of “the people” shaped and fostered the emergence of the ideas and practices of parliamentary democracy as “the people’s rule” [Folkestyre]. This case study thereby challenges contemporary assumptions about an inherently adversarial relationship between populism and democracy. Moreover, it makes a number of empirical and analytical contributions to the existing historiography, as well as the literature on the construction of “the people,” democracy and populism.

In this paper, I review studies of urban integration as analyzed for two groups of mobile newcomers: those designated as “migrants”, that is, mostly marginalized cross-border movers from outside Europe, and mobile EU citizens in Western European cities. This critical and reflexive reading serves to highlight how academic knowledge production on the topic has (re-)produced an image of white urban Europe. While critics of the concept of immigrant integration have suggested that cities and neighborhoods are better sites in which to study migrant integration than the nation-state, the paper demonstrates that studies of urban integration tend to suffer from similar problems, including an ethnonationalist focus and an essentializing of (ethnic) groups. The comparison foregrounds how mobile EU citizens are implicitly thought of as white; their presence in the urban territory is rarely questioned and their practices rarely problematized. In contrast, those designated as migrants are researched with reference to integration, whereby integration means moving closer to white spaces. Thus, studies of the urban integration of migrants use an ethnic framing, while studies of mobile EU citizens focus on class and nationality. The paper thus illuminates how studies of urban integration rely on and reproduce an implicit assumption of whiteness as the norm, even in diverse urban spaces.

The distinctive features of the modern form of citizenship include, among other things, that it is both internally inclusive and externally exclusive; that it establishes legal equality so that membership of the state supersedes all other memberships and allegiances; and that it defines membership as independent of residence. These characteristics largely evolved during the “long nineteenth century”, the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. Similar to that of today, the historical situation in which citizenship evolved was one of intensified mobility. With the example of Sweden, this article finds that citizenship, in both its internal and external dimensions, was elaborated partly as a way to manage the mobility of the migrant poor. The contours of citizenship emerged as authorities aimed to control and direct the movement of the poor, which preceded control efforts. This has implications for our understanding of citizenship as well as of the state, and highlights the agency of migrants.

Studying the transformation of France’s social security system between 1970 and 2020 reveals a recomposition of the power of unelected governmental elites. The institutionalization of a group of “welfare elites” characterized by a new sociological profile (social background and career paths) has led to a reshaping of policy governance (“Iron Triangle”). These High civil servants have carried out a program of “sustainable social welfare,” reinforcing state interventionism in health and social insurance policies. In the context of this program’s implementation, they have developed the role of custodians of state policies. This strengthening of the French state’s capacity sheds new light on the question of its reconfiguration.

This paper combines life course theory and empirical research on the collateral consequences of punishment as a backdrop to exploring the relationship between both the presence of and seriousness of a criminal record measured in early adulthood (age 25) and later life outcomes (ages 41-49), both in total and by socioeconomic status. The analysis relies on a combination of longitudinal survey data and administrative register data for 2,022 individuals who were between 12 and 20 years old when the data collection started. Results show that the criminal record is linked to both labor market and social exclusion later in life, but most systematically to (worse) labor market outcomes. Somewhat surprisingly, low SES seems to “buffer” against some of the unwanted outcomes linked to having a more serious criminal record, while high SES seems to “boost” others. Implications for future research on both deviance and stratification are discussed.

Rather than leading to the emergence of a problem, some processes contribute to limiting their scope and impeding agenda-setting. These “nonproblems” are situations that could have led to social mobilizations or public intervention but end up neither being publicized nor subject to strong policy. We use occupational health in France to illustrate these mechanisms. The social invisibility of work-related ill-health is linked to the joint contribution of two processes. Firstly, from the perspective of research on ignorance and undone science, scientific knowledge is under-developed compared to other public health issues. And even available knowledge is rarely used by policy-makers. Secondly, policies use underestimated numbers from the occupational diseases compensation system. This specific configuration of knowledge/ignorance and official counting plays a central role in the production of occupational health issues as a nonproblem. Their invisibility contributes to the production of inertia and public inaction that characterize public policy in this field.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of everyday experimentations with the category of religion: the “spiritual but not religious,” “religionless” Christians, and many more. Why is there such proliferation of popular experimentation with—and often distancing from—the category of religion? This article explores two such cases of experimentation, a religion-disavowing evangelical Christian brotherhood in Mexico and a Masonic lodge in Switzerland, and shows how, in these two cases, disavowing religion is in part a response to problems associated with a founding principle of liberalism, the separation of private conscience from public citizenship. Subjects of liberal separation are vulnerable to feelings of cloistered conscience and hollow citizenship, problems that are inherent to liberal separation, as evidenced by Freemasonry’s age-old experimentations. These problems are also, however, exacerbated by dwindling popular faith in the institutions of religion and liberal democracy, as evidenced by contemporary evangelical trends of which the Christian brotherhood is exemplary. Such experimentations can be distinguished between those that collapse conscience and citizenship and those that defend the separation while still looking for indirect connections. This contrast is also highlighted by the comparison of religion-disavowing evangelical Christians and Freemasonry.

Since 2008, we have observed a more prominent role of the state in economic life, with the widespread use of financial tools. Advancing discussions on the financialization of distributional politics, the expansion of financial statecraft as a result of fiscal conflicts, and the fragmentation of state power, this article explores how proliferating financial policies reconfigure the state and its relationship with the economy as well as its democratic foundations. I introduce the concept of financial security states to theorize reactions to mature financialization and its inherent instabilities, which provoke socially structured demands for public stabilization. Leveraging the tradition of fiscal sociology, I work out differences between taxation and welfare systems and those based on financial security. In particular, I show that financial security states exploit value uncertainties to postpone loss-reckoning, are carried by hybrid state-banking institutions, and leverage the states’ endogenous power within market-based finance. This article argues that the by-and-large regressive distributional outcomes and fiscal costs of financial policies remain opaque, due to strategic obfuscation, the failure of traditional modes of political mediation, and deficient budgeting procedures.

How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession’s claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. These analyses reveal how a structural rapprochement between macroeconomics and finance created the new subfield of macro-finance. We show that contributions by central bank economists, driven by central banks’ newly acquired macroprudential mandate, were key to its establishment. Acting within the space of regulatory science, they connected macroeconomic and financial knowledge to satisfy their employers’ administrative needs, while also helping to bridge the gaping hole in economic discourse, thereby taking on an important stabilizing role for the epistemic authority of economics.