Global crises constitute challenges for social policy. While social policy is predominantly a national concern, international organisations (IOs) contribute frames of reference for state decisions. In this article, we explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in IOs’ social policy ideas and recommendations in health care, labour market, and social protection policies due to how IOs perceived the crisis’ specific nature, severity, and global scope. We focus on four IOs regarded as key actors in global social policy, namely the ILO, OECD, WHO, and the World Bank. Theoretically, we employ a framework of ideational policy change combining different levels (recommendations – including parameters and instruments – and paradigmatic ideas) with different types of change (layering, conversion, dismantlement, and displacement). We find that IOs have not fundamentally reimagined their pre-pandemic stances during the pandemic. The IOs’ perceptions of the crisis do not undermine IOs’ ideas and recommendations but highlight their appropriateness.

The escalating dengue crisis in Peru demands immediate action from global health organizations, health care authorities, and government officials. Endemic to Peru, dengue has seen a drastic increase in cases, with the largest outbreak on record occurring in the first half of 2023, resulting in 139 366 confirmed cases and 381 deaths. Despite efforts to contain the outbreak through integrated surveillance and response strategies, the crisis worsened in 2024 due to drastic climate changes, exacerbating conditions for dengue transmission. Heavy rains since December 2023 have caused flooding and landslides, creating ideal breeding grounds for dengue vectors. Overwhelmed local authorities, especially in areas with limited access to public services due to floods and landslides, struggle to manage the crisis. With more than half the population at risk of dengue infection, urgent measures are required to control the spread of dengue and mitigate increasing mortality rates. Targeted interventions in areas with limited health care access are crucial, considering underreporting and limitations of health systems, to accurately assess the true burden of the disease and prevent further escalation of the crisis.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

Parliaments are the intermediate link in the representative chain connecting citizens to the government. The parliamentary agenda is often seen as highly responsive because public priorities are usually mirrored in parliamentary debates. However, the level of responsiveness is affected by formal and informal rules of each activity, which considerably shape the attention–concentration capacity and thus the possibility for policy change. During moments of crisis, institutional frictions can be substantially placated, making the agenda concentrating on the crisis issue even in the presence of high institutional frictions. Building on the literature about parliamentary questioning and agenda-setting studies, this article compares the determinants of issue attention for crisis-related issues (economic, migration, and pandemic) in the Italian case over the past 20 years, assessing their impact on written questions and oral questions with immediate response. This article overcomes a limitation of the agenda-setting literature which treats different forms of parliamentary questions as having a single logic and dynamic. Instead, we demonstrate that frictions are extremely variable among different forms of parliamentary questioning and thus, that written and oral questions exhibit different forms of issue responsiveness. This article explores which type of signal parliamentary questions are most responsive to – public concerns, media attention, or real-world indicators – and finds that the answer is highly conditional both on the specific issue under examination and the type of parliamentary questions.

Emergency law serves the dual purpose of granting public authorities the powers to respond to emergencies whilst simultaneously limiting the use of such powers so as to prevent their abuse. To this end, it is crucial that emergency law clearly outlines its own scope by delimiting the grounds that permit the invocation of emergency powers. This article argues that defining those grounds requires distinguishing emergency from normalcy and disentangling it from the broader notion of crisis. Accordingly, the contribution investigates the extent to which a definition of emergency can be accommodated within EU constitutional law. To do so, it draws on examples from European emergency law, understood as encompassing both EU Member States’ laws and the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The article shows that the vague emergency terminology employed in the EU Treaties hinders the identification of a horizontal definition of emergency and risks casting doubt on the constitutional legitimacy of emergency responses by the Union and its Member States.

An idée fixe of Great Moderation economic policy was that central banks are only effective macroeconomic managers when they are segregated from electoral politics. That idea made a swift transition from radical heterodoxy to commonsensical orthodoxy during the 1980s and proved remarkably resistant to reality during the 2008 financial crisis. After almost twenty years of ‘unconventional’ monetary policy, scholars, policymakers, and politicians are justifiably searching for more credible ways to conceptualise and use the nation-state’s monetary authority. Two recent books provide vital energy for that intellectual exercise. Éric Monnet’s Balance of Power is a bold re-conceptualisation of monetary authority as a welfare-state support in liberal democracies. In addition to dissipating the illusion that central banks are simply interest-rate-setting inflation-fighters, Monnet presents a systematic argument for integrating them into a web of deliberative institutions (including public development banks and economically empowered parliaments) to bolster the legitimacy and effectiveness of monetary policy. Relatedly, Manuella Moschella’s Unexpected Revolutionaries attacks the idea that central bankers are responsive only to technocratic doctrine and private-market behaviour, showing how monetary authorities sculpt policies to bolster their reputation with political actors. Paying close reference to private-market liquidity guarantees and quantitative easing, Moschella maps the fortunes of unconventional policy in alignment with political support for financial-market backstops and exceptional economic stimulus. Both books provoke readers to jettison the anodyne generalities of central banks’ own glossy pamphlets and think afresh about the possibilities of economic policy’s new normality.

The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

This article examines the ‘operetta crisis’ that blighted the Italian operetta industry in the 1920s. Little has been written about the crisi dell’operetta in scholarship on Italian operetta to date, despite extensive coverage in contemporary sources. I attribute this neglect to the contested legacy of the composer, impresario and publisher Carlo Lombardo, at the height of his influence in the 1920s and responsible for most of the best-known Italian operettas today. Lombardo’s works embodied critical anxieties about operetta’s perceived artistic degradation, thanks to their overt sexuality and embrace of popular music (i.e. jazz). However, as I argue with reference to the 1925 operetta Cin-ci-là, narratives of artistic decline may miss the true significance of the crisis. Operetta, striving to be a ‘light’ form of opera but never fully accepted as such by the Italian establishment, was ultimately ill-equipped to survive in an entertainment landscape reshaping itself around popular music.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed new challenges for leaders, requiring behavior change and public self-compliance. Stereotypically feminine qualities, such as compassion and a good approach to people, may have helped achieve these goals, rendering the pandemic a “feminine crisis.” The special nature of this crisis, along with media attention on female-led countries successfully managing the pandemic, raises the question of whether female leaders would be perceived as more competent in handling such a crisis. In an experimental study conducted on a representative sample in Poland, we assessed whether female prime minister candidates or candidates with feminine traits had an advantage when their competence in managing a large-scale pandemic was evaluated. Surprisingly, we found that, contrary to national security and economic crises (where male or masculine candidates tend to be advantaged), women or feminine candidates were not perceived as having an advantage in managing a COVID-19 type crisis. Furthermore, conservative participants seemed to perceive male candidates as more competent, even in the pandemic context. Although the differences were small in magnitude, they suggest that even in a potentially “feminine crisis,” women do not fare better than men, while men still fare better in stereotypically male crises.

The public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid surge in activity in biomedical and social science. The pandemic created a need for new scientific knowledge specifically related to the new, emerging infectious agent and it quickly showed huge gaps in knowledge in relation to social and policy responses to pandemics. Governments all over the world accepted the COVID-19 pandemic as a significant public health crisis and went into crisis mode in order to end the crisis and mitigate its impacts. One area in which rapid policy changes occurred was in relation to research ethics. Research ethics systems and guidelines were changed in many countries. The COVID-19 crisis also led to a flurry of philosophical and bioethical work arguing that traditional research ethics rules and principles should be suspended, rethought, or abolished. This essay will analyze whether a public health crisis justifies changing research ethics principles and policies and, if so, what the scope of justified changes is.

Recent scholarship often dismisses entrapment, arguing that there are hardly any identifiable cases; and that powerful states (protectors) can sidestep it by narrowing the treaty conditions under which they have to intervene to defend their weaker allies (protégés). Consequently, alliances and partnerships are nearly always considered risk-free assets. However, this paper argues that several types of entrapment are present. The paper is foremost concerned with classic entrapment, a type referring to a purposeful effort by the protégé to drag the protector into a conflict serving primarily the protégé’s interests. The protégé entraps the protector by placing itself deliberately in danger of defeat and by manipulating the protector’s domestic audience costs. Classic entrapment is likely to succeed under two conditions: (a) when the protégé’s allegiance confers the protector an advantage in a competition against other powerful states; and (b) in informal arrangements, in which there is no clear cut-off point to the protector’s commitment. The paper provides an illustration in the Ottoman Empire’s entrapment of Britain in the crisis preceding the Crimean War. The conclusion considers classic entrapment’s feasibility in present world politics, particularly in the context of Taiwan.