This article investigates the relationships between particular social trust, general social trust, and political trust and tests a variety of political, social-psychological, and social capital theories of them. This sort of research has not been carried out before because until the World Values Survey of 2005–07 there has been, to our knowledge, no comparative survey that includes measures of particular and other forms of trust. The new data challenge a common assumption that particular social trust is either harmful or of little importance in modern democracies and shows that it has strong, positive associations with other forms of trust. However, the relationships are not symmetrical and particular social trust seems to be a necessary but not sufficient cause of general social trust, and both forms of social trust appear to be necessary, but not sufficient conditions for political trust. Strong evidence of mutual associations between different forms of trust at both the individual micro level and the contextual macro level supports theories of rainmaker effects, the importance of political institutions, and the significance of social trust for political trust. In more ways than one, social trust, not least of a particular type, seems to have an important bearing on social and political stability.

Ongoing changes in social structures, orientation, and value systems confront us with the growing necessity to address and understand transforming patterns of tolerance as well as specific aspects, such as social tolerance. Based on hierarchical analyses of the latest World Values Survey (2005–08) and national statistics for 28 countries, we assess both individual and contextual aspects that influence an individual's perception of different social groupings. Using a social tolerance index that captures personal attitudes toward these groupings, we present an institutional theory of social tolerance. Our results show that specific institutional qualities, which reduce status anxiety, such as inclusiveness, universality, and fairness, prevail over traditional socio-economic, societal, cultural, and democratic explanations.

This article examines the conditions under which governments increase spending on active labor market policies (ALMPs), as the European Union and the organization of economic co-operation and development recommend. Given that ALMPs are usually expensive and unlikely to win a government many votes, this study hypothesizes that an improving socio-economic situation is a necessary condition for increased spending. On the basis of the data of 53 governments from 18 established democracies between 1985 and 2003, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis shows that there are different combinations of conditions, or routes, toward activation and that an improving socio-economic situation is needed for each of them. Specifically, the analysis reveals that governments activate under decreasing unemployment combined with (1) trade openness, or (2) the absence of corporatism in the case of leftist governments, or (3) the presence of corporatism in the case of rightist governments. These findings advance our understanding of the politics of labor market reform.

Two currents can be distinguished in the literature regarding the domestic consequences of globalization. One perspective holds that globalization depoliticizes extra-parliamentary protest activity despite the presence of democracy. Another perspective suggests that globalization has contributed to the repoliticization of protest, especially when democracy is present. Using cross-sectional time-series data in a global sample for the 1970–2006 period, the paper examines the effect of globalization on extra-parliamentary protest activity in the context of democracy. The paper further tests these relationships cross-regionally comparing East Asia with Latin America – arguably the two regions in the world where dual transitions to economic and political liberalization have been in full force since 1970s. The results reveal distinct patterns of protest activity cross-regionally, whereby East Asia approximates the depoliticization trend from the global sample. In contrast, the results for Latin America provide confirming evidence for the repoliticization perspective. These findings remain robust across a number of control variables, and different measures of democracy and estimation techniques. Overall, the paper shows that democracy influences the relationship between globalization and extra-parliamentary protest activity – a relationship that up to now has remained systematically untested.

This article examines changes in the electoral relevance of traditional social cleavage groups in eight West European democracies, where electoral relevance is defined as group contributions to party vote shares. The approach presented here demonstrates the critical importance of both the electoral behaviour and the size of the cleavage group when electoral outcomes are of interest. The findings from analyses of the behaviour and size of working class and religious citizens (1975–2002) reveal significant declines in the contributions of these groups to party vote shares. Analyses of the sources of these declines point to the importance of group size, suggesting that the changes we observe in election results and party strategies are likely to be long-lasting alterations in the electoral landscape of Western democracies.

Early analyses of the impact of donor assistance for NGOs across post-socialist Eurasia documented the extent to which the ubiquitous new NGOs were disconnected from indigenous networks, lacked sustainable resources and capacity, and were accountable to donors rather than citizens and governments. Although this article does not entirely contest such conclusions, it examines the role of NGOs from a different normative perspective based on their role as conduits of change rather than as emblems of democratic participation or liberal representation. However, in its critique, the research does contend that there are three fundamental problems with the earlier, somewhat negative analysis: (i) too much was being expected of NGOs and donor assistance; (ii) scholars were attempting to judge the impact of the intervention far too quickly; and (iii) the focus on democracy and civil society obscured the critical ‘governance’ impact that certain NGOs were having in terms of transforming decision-making and state power ‘behind the scenes’. From the empirical perspective of environmental NGOs in post-conflict Bosnia and Serbia, the paper uses a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to ascertain better the impact of external assistance in terms of particular development skills and strategies employed by recipients. The conclusion reached is that donor funding seems to be exerting a positive longer-term impact on the transactional capacities of a small core of environmental NGOs in both locations. Organizations with the most developed transactional capacities, and the few organizations now able to engage transnationally, have obtained a succession of grants over a number of years and have had their transactional activities have been funded specifically by international donors via block grants. Although this does not necessarily prove a positive relationship between donor funding and transactional capacity, it nevertheless challenges more negative assessments in the existing literature.