bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Distracted Attention, Temporal Switches, and the Consolations of Performing
Authors: Gritten Anthony
Published: December 2021

Distraction is frequently blamed for interfering with the ergonomic production of capital, for encouraging substandard performance. Indeed, it is frequently configured as an impediment to timekeeping, a thorn in the side of consciousness, a drag on intentional action, and a brake on decision-making. Reality, however, is complex. While distraction can interfere with timing, anxiety, memory, error, and fatigue, it can also be exploited under controlled conditions to enhance performance by helping the performer to maintain an open cognitive and physical responsiveness to the world and a pragmatic mode of engagement with the task at hand. Indeed, distraction ensures that the performer is in close contact cognitively and socially with the full phenomenological plenitude of sound, thereby contributing to performance’s transformative value as a way of accumulating social capital in everyday life.
Entrepreneurship and SMMEs in South Africa
Authors: Urban Boris
Published: December 2021

Abstract: The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted nature of entrepreneurship and SMMEs in South Africa by presenting a broad range of key economic questions, challenges, and policy issues. Acknowledging the complexity of describing entrepreneurship and SMMEs, due to definitional controversies and the variety of contexts in which these phenomena occur, different typologies are juxtaposed to highlight the heterogeneity in entrepreneurial activity. Despite a lack of consistent and accurate data, the findings show that while entrepreneurship is publicly campaigned as an imperative for national economic development and employment creation, in reality South Africa’s low established-business entrepreneurial activity rate does not result in any significant economic growth. By interrogating a broad range of individual and contextual factors in the South African entrepreneurial ecosystem, it is evident that a number of structural, institutional, market, and policy issues obstruct productive entrepreneurial growth and development.
Industrial Policy in South Africa
Authors: Black Anthony
Published: December 2021

Abstract: Manufacturing in South Africa has been the subject of strong industrial policy support. Since 1994, the sector has undergone major structural shifts but the sector has performed poorly. Trade liberalization, which started to take effect before 1994, led to rapid import penetration across a wide range of sectors. For the most part the export response was disappointing. From 2007, there has been a shift to more intensive sectoral industrial policy. But this coincided with a number of very negative developments including the global financial crisis as well as serious infrastructure constraints. The specifics of industrial policy are examined in heavy industry, the automotive sector, and light manufacturing as well as in the outcomes of regional industrial development policies. The chapter concludes that South Africa needs to be on a more labour-absorbing growth path which requires appropriate industrial as well as other policies.
The South African Informal Economy
Authors: Rogan Michael , Skinner Caroline
Published: December 2021

The literature and key policy debates on the South African informal economy are reviewed through the lens of Chen’s taxonomy of informal economy debates into legalist, dualist, voluntarist, and structuralist schools of thought. Previous insights are supplemented with an empirical analysis of the South African informal economy, using Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Surveys. Together these analyses suggest that the post-apartheid informal economy is characterized by a large degree of heterogeneity by status in employment and sectoral distribution and is highly gendered in its segmentation. Further, earnings are low for all but a few groups of informal workers. Much of the existing evidence also suggests that, somewhat in contrast to conventional economic theory, the South African informal economy does not absorb newcomers easily, and particularly not in times of crisis. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the primary thrust of post-apartheid policy and by examining South Africa’s response to the global call to promote the formalization of the informal economy.
The Economics of Households in South Africa
Authors: Posel Dorrit , Hall Katharine
Published: December 2021

Abstract: This chapter first provides a brief historical review of household formation and its disruption during the apartheid decades. It then uses national micro-data (1995–2018) to describe broad changes in household formation since the democratic transition. Among these trends, the chapter highlights a sizeable increase in household formation and a decrease in average household size, associated partly with a rise in single-person households and a fall in fertility rates. Gendered living arrangements have also changed considerably as the share of households with a co-resident couple has fallen. Specifically, the growth of households where all resident adults are either female or male has far exceeded overall household formation, and the share of children living only with their mother has risen apace. However, households also continue to be stretched to include members who live elsewhere for much of the year. The chapter then sketches the variation in economic resources across different household types, highlighting changes in recent decades.
Public Finance and Fiscal Policy in South Africa
Authors: Ajam Tania
Published: December 2021

This chapter explores the trajectory of post-apartheid fiscal policy, focusing on the growth, equity, and sustainability trends between 2009 and 2019. Buoyed by the commodity boom, the African National Congress governing party strengthened fiscal institutions, improving the credibility and solvency of fiscal policy in the first fourteen years after the democratic transition. The decade after the global financial crisis in 2008 saw declining potential growth rates, deteriorating terms of trade, the institutionalization of state capture during the Zuma administration until 2018, policy uncertainty, widespread electricity outages, and a burgeoning public-sector wage bill. Rising deficits, debt, and state-owned-enterprise contingent liabilities triggered austerity without genuine fiscal consolidation. The coronavirus pandemic amplified these unsustainable trends arising from deferred structural fiscal adjustment.
Public Debt in South Africa
Authors: Bittencourt Manoel
Published: December 2021

After four decades of racial segregation, South Africa transitioned to a non-racial democracy in 1994. Inevitably for a country with segregationist labour market policies for so long, South Africa is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. In order to take an overview of government debt in South Africa, this chapter looks at macroeconomic performance but also at how the political regime characteristics and inequality have interplayed with government debt during the 1970–2016 period. The data suggest that economic growth correlates negatively with debt and that democracy correlates positively with debt. In addition, the data do not suggest that democratic maturity is already associated with lower debt nor that the outgoing apartheid-era National Party bequeathed the young democracy with high debt. Encouragingly, the data do suggest that inequality and public expenditure on education correlate positively with debt, which suggests that the democratic government has the median voter in mind when creating debt and also that part of the debt is being invested in human capital formation.
Banking and Finance in South Africa
Authors: Hawkins Penelope
Published: December 2021

Abstract: The importance of the financial sector is widely recognized by the public––who use and benefit from the products and services of the different financial industries––bank loans, insurance products, investments, and the payments system (to name a few). This chapter describes the different financial intermediaries, financial auxiliaries, and financial market infrastructure that comprise the sophisticated South African financial sector. Emphasis is placed on the banks whose liabilities (deposits) are uniquely the means of payment (money) and whose assets are loans to businesses, households, and the government. The role of banks is straightforward, but their basic fragility and risks they face in an uncertain world are complex. Failure of a major financial intermediary within the context of a deeply integrated system will have significant costs for the rest of the economy. For this reason, regulation tends to err on the side of caution, where stability is prioritized. This leads to a system where conservativism rules and profitability for the systemically important institutions is virtually assured. The chapter argues for greater awareness of the regulatory compromises given that the success of the sector is not costless to society.
Quintilian in the Graeco-Roman Rhetorical Tradition
Authors: Enos Richard Leo
Published: December 2021

Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (c.95 ce) provides a comprehensive statement on education based on the author’s belief that the study of rhetoric was essential both for the growth of the individual and also for serving the welfare of the state through effective leadership that united wisdom with eloquence. Quintilian’s Institutio is often identified exclusively as a work of Roman rhetoric. Viewing the Institutio as uniquely Roman is understandable. In the Institutio, Quintilian often used Cicero—the pre-eminent orator and rhetorician of the Roman Republic—as a model whose career illustrated the best features of Roman rhetoric and citizenship. However, viewing Quintilian’s Institutio as exclusively Roman distorts the influence that Greek rhetoric had on Quintilian’s work. Quintilian, and even his Roman model Cicero, were both influenced by Greek rhetoric, especially the contributions of Isocrates. Quintilian’s Institutio is better understood, and appreciated, as a ratio or system that was built upon a foundation of Hellenic rhetoric and a shining example of the Graeco-Roman rhetorical tradition. This chapter reveals a spectrum of Greek contributions in Quintilian’s Institutio ranging from isolated technical concepts to an overarching philosophy of civic rhetoric predicated on the officia or ‘duties’ of good, virtuous citizens eloquently applying rhetoric for social betterment. Quintilian’s use and command of Greek rhetoric is well demonstrated and his indebtedness to Greek sources for crafting his own ‘Roman’ rhetoric is evident throughout his Institutio.
Quintilian on Memory and Delivery
Authors: Levene D.S.
Published: December 2021

This chapter discusses Quintilian’s account of delivery and memory, especially (though not solely) with regard to his extended treatment of them in Book 11. With delivery, it surveys such issues as his discussion of the appropriate gesture and voice to be adopted by the orator, and the pragmatics of delivering a speech before a Roman audience. It discusses Quintilian’s heavily gendered and class-based account of appropriate delivery, where the orator has to adopt manners appropriate for a high-status male and eschew the contrary; it also considers the uneasy relationship between high-status oratory and low-status acting. It focuses above all on the highly textualized account of performance in Quintilian, where delivery is closely linked to an assumed written text, and argues that this is the consequence of Quintilian’s classicism, where oratory is associated with an established literary canon on a par with other literary genres. With memory, it briefly discusses his mnemotechnics, but argues that Quintilian is pulled between two incompatible desires: the classicism which leads him to want to associate memorization with fidelity to a written text, but also the pragmatism which requires a large measure of spontaneity and improvisation, which may be hindered if the orator has prepared a memorized text in advance.
On Cyber-Enabled Information Warfare and Information Operations
Authors: Lin Herbert , Kerr Jaclyn
Published: December 2021

The United States has no peer competitors in conventional military power. But its adversaries are increasingly turning to asymmetric methods for engaging in conflict. This paper advances the idea of cyber-enabled information warfare and influence operations (IWIO) as a form of conflict or confrontation to which the United States (and liberal democracies more generally) are particularly vulnerable. IWIO is the deliberate use of information against an adversary to confuse, mislead, and perhaps to influence the choices and decisions that the adversary makes. IWIO is a hostile activity, or at least an activity that is conducted between two parties whose interests are not well aligned, but it does not constitute warfare in the sense that international law or domestic institutions construe it. IWIO takes advantage of systematic biases in human cognition towards non-rational thought. Cyber-enabled IWIO exploits these biases even more through the use of modern communications technologies to facilitate high connectivity, low latency, high degrees of anonymity, insensitivity to distance and national borders, democratized access to publishing capabilities, and inexpensive production and consumption of information content. Some approaches to counter IWIO show some promise of having some modest but valuable defensive effect. But, on the whole, there are no good solutions for large-scale countering of IWIO in free and democratic societies. Development of new tactics and responses is therefore needed.
Data Privacy and Security Law
Authors: Cate Fred , Dockery Rachel
Published: December 2021

This chapter discusses cybersecurity laws. Many measures employed to enhance cybersecurity pose a risk to privacy. In addition, data protection laws focus only on personally identifiable information, while cybersecurity is also concerned with securing economic data such as trade secrets and company databases, government information, and the systems that transmit and process information. As a practical matter, despite the prominence of security obligations in data protection legislation, these were often downplayed or ignored entirely until recent years. Only as cybersecurity threats became more pressing did regulators begin actively enforcing the security obligations found in most data protection laws. More recently, legislative bodies and regulators have begun adopting cybersecurity-specific obligations. However, even these have often mirrored or been combined with privacy protections, sometimes to the detriment of effective cybersecurity. The chapter describes major categories of cybersecurity law, including unfair or deceptive practices legislation, breach notification laws, and data destruction laws. It also considers the new focus on critical infrastructure and information sharing, the China Cybersecurity Law, and the new challenges to data privacy and security law.
Cybersecurity Capacity Building
Authors: Pace Lara , Cornish Paul
Published: December 2021

Some claim that cybersecurity capacity building has developed into a discrete specialism. But, if it has become a niche activity, it is one that nevertheless comes into contact with a wide array of policy areas, ranging from national and international security to human rights and civil liberties, technological and industrial innovation, and socio-economic development. On this basis, if capacity building in cybersecurity ever was a distinct and autonomous activity, then its chances of remaining so are slim as it becomes part and parcel of the general political discourse. As awareness of cybersecurity sharpens, and as economic and social dependency on the Internet becomes ever more pronounced, so the security and prosperity of cyberspace will be at the heart of any evolving or new public policy debate around the world. This chapter argues that cybersecurity capacity building has become much less a specialized, niche activity and much more a norm.
A Political History of Cyberspace
Authors: Carr Madeline
Published: December 2021

The political history of cyberspace can reveal much about contemporary and future cyber security challenges. This chapter includes some technological history but, more importantly, it also addresses the political forces and trends that fundamentally shaped the development of cyberspace. In doing so, it provides insight into why cyber security is much more than a technical challenge, and why politics can be simultaneously an obstruction to better global cyber security and also the best hope for it. Observing how political perceptions of cyber security threats have both changed and remained constant over time helps put current approaches into perspective, avoiding the two reductionist arguments that either ‘everything is different now’ or ‘it is the same as it ever was’. Addressing future challenges like the Internet of Things and future remedies like emergent cyber norms require a sound understanding of the past. Essentially, this chapter calls for much more careful and comprehensive engagement with the interrelationship between technological developments and political forces.
Cybersecurity, Global Commerce, and International Organizations
Authors: Fidler David
Published: December 2021

As private-sector enterprises became dependent on Internet-enabled technologies, cybersecurity threats developed into serious problems in international political economy. This chapter analyses how states use international organizations to address these threats. The chapter explains why international organizations were not prominent in the Internet’s emergence and impact on transnational trade and investment. It examines the main threats companies face, including cybercrime, economic cyber espionage, government surveillance and hacking, innovation in digital technologies, and poor corporate cyber defences. International organizations have been most involved in fighting cybercrime, but these efforts have not been successful. International organizations do not play significant roles in countering other cybersecurity threats in global commerce. The chapter argues that international organizations are unlikely to become more important in the future because geopolitics and shifts in domestic politics in democracies will make collective action on cybersecurity in global commerce more difficult.
Getting Beyond Norms
Authors: Hathaway Melissa
Published: December 2021

In recent years, countries have become increasingly concerned about the immediate and future threats to their critical services and infrastructures that could result from the misuse of information and communications technologies (ICTs). As such, countries have placed the development of normative standards guiding state behaviour in cyberspace at the top of their foreign policy agendas. Yet, despite broad international consensus regarding the basic principles to limit the misuse of ICTs in the digital age and to constrain state behaviour, the key tenets have been consistently violated. All evidence suggests that states are not following their own doctrines of restraint, and that each disruptive and destructive attack further destabilizes our future. States have turned a blind eye and have shirked their responsibility for curbing or halting cyberattacks originating from their own territories. Disruption or damage (or both) of critical infrastructures that provide services to the public has become customary practice—the ‘new normal’. And this intentional misuse of ICTs against critical infrastructures and services has great potential to lead to misperception, escalation, and even conflict. This chapter offers five standards of care that can be used to ‘test’ individual states’ true commitment to the international norms of behaviour. Only with a concerted and coordinated effort across the global community will it be possible to change the new normal of ‘anything goes’ and move forward to ensure the future safety and security of the Internet and Internet-based infrastructures.
Community of Common Future in Cyberspace
Authors: Lan Tang
Published: December 2021

This chapter begins with an account of the current state of China’s digitization and cybersecurity. Benefitting from the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), China achieved a rapid evolution from a semi-industrial country to a digitized nation. Besides these immense advantages, ICT has acted as a powerful catalyst, bringing huge benefits to every aspect of Chinese society. Yet cyberspace has also created a new dimension of insecurity and disarray due to the increasing dependence on a brand-new interconnected ecosystem. The chapter then examines the meaning of, and the necessity for, a ‘community of common destiny’ in cyberspace, before continuing to illuminate what China can do at the domestic and international levels to pursue this aim. It also analyses the implications of China’s approach for the stability and security of international cyberspace.
Look West or Look East? India at the Crossroads of Cyberspace
Authors: Sukumar Arun Mohan
Published: December 2021

This chapter explores how India has managed its external environment with a view to securing its own digital ecosystems. It highlights India’s engagement with the United States and China, the biggest players in its digital ecosystem. Both relationships reflect certain geopolitical realities, but also offer contrasting narratives. India and the United States have sought in recent years to align their views on the governance of common digital spaces, whereas New Delhi's outreach to China has been more instrumental, and largely confined to interactions with specific Chinese companies that invest in the country. Mindful, however, of Beijing's potential to expand its influence in Asian economies by supplying their digital infrastructure and applications, India has acknowledged the need to engage China at a strategic level on ‘cyber’ issues. Its high-level interactions with the United States and China could lead India to a crossroads from where it has to choose one model of standards, rules, and norms for cybersecurity and Internet governance over the other.
The Russian Federation’s Approach to Cybersecurity
Authors: Shingarev Anton , Kazakova Anastasiya
Published: December 2021

This chapter discusses the approach of the Russian Federation in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of international security and peace. After analysing the conceptual framework and definitions, as well as key distinguishing features in Russia’s approach, it gives an overview of Russia’s regulatory landscape and main legislative acts concerning cybersecurity and international security broadly. It also provides an analysis of Russian foreign policy on cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity in Israel
Authors: Tabansky Lior
Published: December 2021

The long-standing pillars in the grand strategy of Israel—namely, the qualitative edge principle and self-reliance in defence—enabled considerable cybersecurity achievements. Israel, the sole developed nation facing existential threats, has carried out audacious cyberspace operations yet never suffered material damage from cyberattacks. ‘Made in Israel’ inventions have long been embedded in building blocks of the global digital technologies, and drive much of the economic boom. As high-technology innovation flourishes, strategic choices taken over many decades created the foundations of Israel’s vibrant innovation ecosystem. Power, the currency of international relations, undergoes technology-driven change. Innovation capacity grows in importance in periods of profound change. Cyber power must be smart, integrating hard and soft power. The official Israel now shares sensitive cybersecurity expertise with foreign stakeholders, aiming to advance a range of foreign policy goals from counterterrorism to sustainable development. The milestones in Israel’s national cybersecurity evolution include the 2002 state-guided Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP); the 2011 official national cybersecurity strategy with ambitious goals and comprehensive scope; and the most recent developments in the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). However, Israel’s cybersecurity journey is far from complete. Harnessing digital transformation, in particular narrow artificial intelligence and intelligent systems, requires further profound innovation in national security. This chapter outlines four guiding principles and forces shaping Israel’s cybersecurity, and sketches three long-term policy challenges for Israel. As long as a coherent strategy guides innovation, Israel as well as other small nations can gain and utilize ample cyber power.
Project Solarium 1953 and the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2019
Authors: Steinmetz Mike
Published: December 2021

The word ‘Solarium’ means different things to different people. To some, it evokes an era of global uncertainty with competing nuclear powers. To others, it brings to mind a threat so compelling that a US President formed a special project to reshape US policy rapidly. The word Solarium again inspires hope, optimism, and expectation that cybersecurity—one of the most critical challenges of the twenty-first century—can be addressed as successfully as challenges from the past. Will combining the name Solarium with the twenty-first-century threat’s gravity deliver similar results as it did in 1953? What exactly did Project Solarium 1953 provide? In what way is the global nuclear threat and spread of communism in 1953 comparable to the global cyber threat of the twenty-first century, and is there a risk that the comparison might either over-simplify a complex problem or, worse still, provoke an inappropriately exaggerated and perhaps even apocalyptic approach to cyberspace security? Are there other aspects of the 1953 Project Solarium that offer more useful insights into the human elements of policymaking? Does the naming of the 2019 Cybersecurity Commission as the Cybersecurity Solarium Commission provide little more than smart branding?
Demography and Health in the Context of Climate Change
Authors: Graves Alisha , Moumouni Nouhou Abdoul , Potts Malcolm
Published: December 2021

The Sahel is subject to uniquely rapid population growth—putting pressure on already scarce resources. The challenge to meet the basic needs of a rapidly growing population is compounded by the impacts of climate change. Despite the recent gains in child survival in the Sahel, three contextual factors combine to suggest that mortality rates could rise—especially among the most vulnerable populations, that is, infants and the elderly. These factors are: an ongoing protracted nutrition crisis, rapid population growth, and impacts of climate change on food production. Evidence-based population policies and large-scale investment in family planning and girls’ secondary education have the potential to curb current demographic trends, making it easier for the region to adapt to climate change and achieve long-term food security.
Informal Economies of the Sahel
Authors: Guèye Fatou , Aly Mbaye Ahmadou
Published: December 2021

Sahelian countries, while sharing many features of other Sub-Saharan African economies, face some unique economic challenges, which merit particular scrutiny, notably: a sizable demographic bulge, being landlocked, a lower income per head, and a higher poverty incidence. The picture is further darkened by critical governance weaknesses, political instability, and radical Islamist threats, which, as discussed in other chapters in this volume, have caused serious security challenges within, and across, national borders. All these factors have contributed to a downsizing of the formal business environment and an expansion of the informal sector. This chapter assesses the relative weights of the formal and informal sectors in Sahelian national economies, its growth dynamics, as well as employment and productivity patterns. It also examines the implications of the rise of the informal sector for institutions and governance, social inclusion, and stability.
Corruption and The State in the Sahel
Authors: Blundo Giorgio
Published: December 2021

Systemic corruption in the Sahel is the outcome of particular historical and institutional trajectories of state-building efforts, of factionalism and patronage, and of the inability of the state apparatus to rely on alternative mechanisms to ensure its survival and legitimacy. One key feature that emerges from the analysis and comparisons of multiple case studies is the extraordinary propagation of everyday corruption, to be distinguished from “big” corruption, and the ambivalent perceptions of it by citizens when dealing with the bureaucracy. Daily corruption practices manifest themselves in a variety of forms and underpin especially the delivery of basic public services. Corruption in the Sahel is an institutionalized way of managing people and exercising power in situations of limited accountability, and is closely connected with other dynamics operating within the social and economic system.
Militaries in Sahelian Politics
Authors: Elischer Sebastian
Published: December 2021

The chapter analyses the trajectories of military rule across the francophone Sahel. It distinguishes between three clusters of countries. Senegal constitutes one extreme on the civil–military spectrum as it has enjoyed continuous civilian rule. Mauritania and Chad, where military rulers have remained part of the ruling elites since the 1970s, constitute the other extreme. Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali are located somewhere in between. Although the Burkinabè armed forces for a long time acted as a pillar of autocratic rule, a large segment of the military eventually helped pave the way for democratization. In Niger and Mali military rule ended with the liberalization of Africa’s political sphere in the early 1990s. Both militaries have again intervened in politics through coups, yet each intervention has proven short-lived. There remains, however, a visible faction that wishes to return to military rule within the armed forces in every Sahelian country.
Pastoralist Societies in the Sahel
Authors: Wilson-Fall Wendy
Published: December 2021

This chapter focuses on ways that pastoralists respond to ecological and climate variability through strategies of pastoral mobility and exploitation of micro-ecologies throughout the Sahel. The chapter reflects recent scholarly work that argues for recognition of the viability of mobile pastoral systems and their long-term value to national economies and rural community nutrition. West African pasturelands are as biodiverse as woodlands further south, and herders exercise strategic decision-making not accounted for among most government decision-makers before the mid-1990s. In addition to policy challenges, twenty-first-century Sahelian pastoralists are faced with constraints on pasture access, criminal activity, climate instability, and religious radicalism. This chapter argues that intra-regional issues of land use policy and tension between extensive pastoral production systems and projects of nation-building are at the center of current political instability in pastoral communities.
Burkina Faso
Authors: Harsch Ernest
Published: December 2021

Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) shares many of the problems of other countries in the Sahel. Those include an arid and increasingly difficult climate, a weak economy, high levels of poverty, a youthful and rapidly growing population, ethnic and religious tensions, and a history of poor governance. While most states in the region also have experienced notable political instability, Burkina Faso has had a particular tendency toward rebellion, ranging from a military-led revolutionary experience in the 1980s to a popular insurrection that toppled a long-ruling autocrat in 2014. The latter upheaval brought a restoration of democracy, constitutional order, and the possibility of major reform. That progress, however, has been threatened by an escalation of regional and local jihadi attacks since 2015. As security has increased in priority for Burkina Faso, so has the country’s direct collaboration and engagement with its Sahelian neighbors.
Old-Age Pensions
Authors: Hinrichs Karl , Lynch Julia F.
Published: December 2021

Welfare states within the traditional OECD area arranged their pension systems after 1945 so that complete exit from paid employment during an ever-longer retirement period became a universal entitlement. The institutionalization of old-age pensions in the OECD area resulted from an expansion of pension systems in several dimensions: coverage was broadened to almost the entire (working) population, eligibility criteria for enjoying a pension became liberalized (e.g. flexible retirement), the range of benefits was expanded (e.g. survivors’ pensions) and, most importantly, the generosity of benefits substantially increased. This chapter describes the origins, organization, and social consequences of mature pension systems in the developed welfare states; discusses the challenges posed to these systems by demographic, economic, and societal transformations occurring since the 1970s; and traces trajectories of reform, both actual and anticipated. Throughout, our focus is on the pension systems of the rich democracies of Western Europe, North America, and the Antipodes, with more selective attention given to developments in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Disability
Authors: Priestley Mark
Published: December 2021

Disability presents a key challenge for modern welfare states. It has been a core policy concern throughout their evolution, but the concept of disability, and what it means for public policy, has changed radically in the past half-century. Disability is now widely understood, from a social model perspective, as an issue of social inclusion and social justice. It is also framed by increasingly coherent international human rights frameworks. The chapter reviews changing ideas about disability, and changing policy responses to it, from the early origins of the welfare state to the contemporary global governance of human rights. It examines approaches to disability policy in terms of cash and in-kind entitlements, employment-focused policies, and broader rights-based approaches. Disability is a flexible administrative category that has been deployed selectively to control of labour supply and welfare entitlement. Reframing national disability policies within a global discourse of social rights has been an important development, but rights-based legislation alone is unlikely to resolve its structural basis in capitalist markets and there is still little evidence of marked improvement in aggregate social outcomes for disabled people.
Social Assistance
Authors: Bahle Thomas , Wendt Claus
Published: December 2021

Social assistance guarantees basic social rights and provides means-tested, residual benefits to persons in need. It is the last safety net of the welfare state. The actual significance of social assistance varies by welfare regime: the more inclusive and generous a social security system, the less important usually is social assistance. In the Nordic countries, for example, with highly developed social security, few persons actually depend on social assistance. By contrast, in most countries with a liberal welfare regime, social assistance is an essential part of the welfare state. Yet in most cases, social assistance is not a viable alternative to inclusive social security. In Southern or Eastern European countries with rudimentary welfare states, social assistance is also patchy, exclusive, and rudimentary. In continental European countries, the situation varies by population group: most systems are more generous to the elderly than to families with children, and in particular to the unemployed. Moreover, in almost all countries social assistance benefits do not actually lift people out of poverty. Social assistance thus provides a basic minimum income for some groups, but does not effectively prevent poverty. In general, social assistance is more effective in countries in which it clearly operates as a last safety net within an otherwise well-developed overall social security system.
Models of the Welfare State
Authors: Manow Philip
Published: December 2021

IN 1990, Gøsta Esping-Andersen published The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a work which has turned out to be the single most important and decisive contribution to welfare state research in the past thirty to forty years. In essence, Esping-Andersen argued that we can observe systematic variation in the character of the developed welfare states of the West, which he grouped into three distinct welfare state models: a Scandinavian social democratic model, a conservative continental European model, and a liberal Anglo-Saxon model. This chapter provides a short description of Esping-Andersen’s three regimes; introduces a fourth, Southern European model, which will then be described in somewhat more detail; and outlines a historical and genealogical account of the development of all four models. Finally, the chapter briefly expands on the comparative perspective with a short discussion on whether the regime concept or the understanding of distinct welfare models can also be applied to other regions, such as Latin America and Asia.
Central and Eastern European Countries
Authors: Cook Linda J. , Inglot Tomasz
Published: December 2021

This chapter discusses welfare state developments in eleven countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that have joined the European Union since 2004. It addresses historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts, with reference to theoretical questions involving typologies, clustering, and patterns of convergence in social policies. It analyses diversity in welfare provision that we can observe not only within the region, but also in Europe as a whole. It also explores different social policy programmes and benefits, contrasting international and domestic influences that have become relevant especially since the Great Recession of 2008. These influences include continuing pressures of EU integration and countervailing domestic trends of rising nationalism, populism, and Euro-scepticism within CEE states, especially in Hungary and Poland. The chapter discusses four main areas of CEE welfare from 2008 until 2020: family policy, health care, employment and labour markets, and social security (pensions) and social assistance. It illustrates region-wide and subregional trends and commonalities, as well as divergence across individual welfare states. At least in Poland and Hungary, conservative, family-orientated ideas that are often promoted as an ‘antidote’ to more liberal European norms seem to have driven policy reforms more than any other factor. Nationalist and populist leaders have expanded many welfare programmes, but their rhetoric could not hide the high levels of inequality in income, health, housing, and many other areas that persist and have not been adequately addressed by social policy in CEE states.
Religion and Politics in the European Union
Authors: Leustean Lucian N.
Published: December 2021

This chapter investigates the political mobilization of religious networks in the construction of the European Union by focusing on the role of key religious organizations in dialogue with European institutions, from the 1950 Schuman Declaration to the institutionalization of religious dialogue in Article 17 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. It sets out a typology of transnational religious structures, elaborates the main policy areas for religious/convictional actors, and discusses major challenges to the present structure and nature of the European Union, paying particular attention to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit), the movement of forcibly displaced populations, and the rise of populism and right-wing nationalism.
Protestantism and Europe
Authors: Nelsen Brent F. , Guth James L.
Published: December 2021

The Reformation still shapes European society—and its most important post-war creation, the European Union. This chapter explores how Protestantism fractured Western Christendom, sacralized national identity, and invented the nation-state as an alternative Christian society. In the process, Protestants fostered a profound antipathy to the Catholic ‘other’ and a powerful affinity for national borders making it difficult to imagine joining a federal Europe. They were reluctant to enter the EU and awkward on arrival. Protestants never caught the vision of a united Europe, nor did the continentals grasp how Protestant national identities would resist any sacrifice of sovereignty. This clash of irreconcilable visions—one Catholic, one Protestant—became an obstacle to post-war efforts to unite Europe and has led to enduring differences in the behaviour of states, elites, churches, political parties, interest groups, and public opinion towards integration and European identity.
Non-religion and Europe
Authors: Bullock Josh , Bullivant Stephen
Published: December 2021

This chapter is concerned with the growing phenomenon of non-religion and its place in modern Europe. The secular is hardly a new idea in European history but its nature and forms evolve. The focus here is on the growing significance of non-religion in the twenty-first century, especially among younger people. This phenomenon is approached in different ways: conceptually, statistically, and ethnographically. The conceptual approach emphasizes the shift away from simply the absence of religion to the presence of a positively chosen alternative. The statistical section underlines the considerable variations in the presence of non-religion both within and across the different parts of Europe and the reasons for this. Finally, three ethnographic vignettes illustrate the diverse ways in which substantive and engaged expressions of non-religion ‘make sense’ within their particular socio-religious contexts.
Managing Religious Diversity in Europe
Authors: Sealy Thomas , Magazzini Tina , Modood Tariq , Triandafyllidou Anna
Published: December 2021

Since the mid-twentieth century, religion in Europe has faced three inter-related trends: the waning of Christianity, increasing secularization, and rising levels of diversity stemming from growing globalization and changing migration patterns. As a result, all European states confront the same broad question: how to adapt existing church–state relations and norms of secularism to an extra-Christian religious diversity that the continent has not known before. At the same time, Europe features a ‘bewildering variety’ of political and institutional connections when it comes to the governance of religious diversity, reflecting different historical inheritances. To make sense of this, this chapter discusses these dynamics in relation to three processes: the politicization, institutionalization, and securitization of religion and divides its discussion into three confessional regions—a majority Protestant North-West, a majority Catholic South, and a majority Orthodox East—in order to analyse how, from their many different starting points, European states are addressing contemporary religious diversity.
The Baltic Countries
Authors: Rimestad Sebastian
Published: December 2021

The three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have a varied religious history. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were the last region of Europe to be Christianized. Today, they—and especially Estonia—are among the most secularized societies in the world. This is not only due to the Soviet past but also to Baltic German dominance at key moments in their history. While Lutheranism has dominated in the north (in Estonia and Latvia), the Roman Catholic Church is still the main religious player in the south (in Lithuania and parts of Latvia). Primarily due to Russian migration, the Orthodox Church also plays a significant role in Baltic affairs. There is, finally, a small but vibrant cluster of new religious movements, notably neo-pagan groups.
Italy
Authors: Ferlan Claudio , Ventura Marco
Published: December 2021

The history of religion in Italy reveals both a continuing Catholic presence and growing religious diversity. This chapter traces this history from medieval times, through early modern, pre-unification Italy, to the struggle for unity, the forcible end of the Pontifical States, and the problematic coexistence of the Holy See, the Catholic Church, and the Kingdom of Italy after 1861. The later sections deal with the appeasement of the Holy See under fascist rule and the Lateran Pacts of 1929; then the transition from fascism to democracy and from monarchy to republic, through the referendum of 1946 and the Constitution of 1948. Central to this evolution is the explicit acknowledgment that Italy is no longer a Catholic state; conversely laicità is identified as the supreme constitutional principle. Since 1989, cultural Christianity and the consolidation of various forms of Catholic preference are learning to coexist with an increasingly multi-religious population.
The Low Countries
Authors: Molendijk Arie L.
Published: December 2021

Notwithstanding certain similarities, Belgium and the Netherlands have different national histories. Keeping this in mind, this chapter is divided into four sections: early history, pillarization, secularization, and Islam and new developments. From its foundation in 1830, Belgium has been predominantly Catholic, whereas the Netherlands claimed to be a Protestant nation, despite a large minority of Catholics. In the late nineteenth century, self-contained worlds (‘pillars’) emerged in both countries. Catholics, and in the Netherlands orthodox Protestants as well, used their many-branched pillars of societal organizations to emancipate and mobilize their constituencies. In the 1960s, the pillars started to crumble and the number of non-affiliated rose to 42 per cent in Belgium, and 68 per cent in the Netherlands. Notwithstanding the immigration of significant groups of Christians and Muslims and a flourishing market in spirituality, both countries have become very secularized. A final note summarizes the situation in Luxembourg.
Ukraine and Russia
Authors: Coleman Heather J.
Published: December 2021

This chapter describes the intertwined religious and political histories of Russia and Ukraine, focusing on church–state relations and religion’s role in relations between the two nations. It analyzes the common origins of these countries in medieval Kyivan Rus’, and the ongoing debate about the significance of the decision to accept Orthodox Christianity in 988 to both the relationship between church and state and the cultural orientation of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. It traces the legacy of separate religious development in the medieval era; changing church–state relations in Russia; the use of religion as a mode of governance; the civilizational debate about Orthodoxy and European identity; the experience under the Soviet regime; religious revival amid the collapse of communism; and post-communist tensions about the role of religion in a pluralist society, and about competing visions of a ‘Russian World’ on one hand and autocephaly for Ukrainian Orthodoxy on the other.
Spain and Portugal
Authors: de la Cueva Julio
Published: December 2021

The modern religious history of Spain and Portugal begins with the religious unity between the state and society forged around Catholicism, and ends with the present era epitomized by ongoing secularization and incipient religious pluralism. With some difficulty, the Catholic Church adapted to the trials posed by nineteenth-century liberalism, reaching an accommodation with the constitutional monarchies in both Iberian countries. The first serious challenge came with the arrival of the republics in Portugal in 1910 and in Spain in 1931. The republics did not last long, however; two Catholic dictatorships governed the fate of the Peninsula until the 1970s, though separation of church and state was formally maintained in Portugal. The dictatorships ended in 1974 and 1975, respectively, giving way to the establishment of new democracies, accompanied on the one hand by secularization in both the state and society, and on the other by growing religious pluralism.