Politics & Society

There is general sentiment that insecurity is on the rise across countries. However, some groups are likely to be more vulnerable to shocks than others, indicating that we may not expect insecurity to be equally distributed across the population. In this article, we examine how subjective insecurity is distributed and then turn to the question of whether welfare states can reduce potential gaps in subjective insecurity. Using multilevel models with cross-national data for about 35,000 individuals in twenty advanced democracies from two waves of the OECD's Risks That Matter (RTM) survey (2020 and 2022), we find that the poor are more insecure and that, in general, welfare state schemes have the capacity to reduce overall subjective insecurity. However, welfare state interventions do not meaningfully reduce the subjective security gap between income groups. With regard to the subjective insecurity gap between women and men, welfare policies similarly have only a very small effect. We complement this with national, over-time survey data from Denmark. We not only see that subjective insecurity has increased over time, but also that there is a growing subjective security gap, echoing the cross-national findings.

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between protest and repression. Less often examined is the legislative suppression of protest by elites seeking to make protest more costly to protesters. Because state legislatures are largely invisible to the public, this “wholesale” suppression of protest is less likely to trigger public opposition than repression by the police. This study explains the sharp increase in the number and the severity of state legislative bills to repress the right to protest both before and after the election of Donald Trump. In particular, it examines whether these can be attributed either to Republican control of state legislatures or to protest threat. Contrary to the findings in much of the literature, bills aimed at suppressing protest are less closely related to threat than to the realignment of state politics. The article also finds that these proposals were influenced by diffusion through policy brokerage.

Explaining digital impacts on social movements requires moving beyond technological determinism by addressing two underdeveloped questions: How does political strategy shape the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs)? And how do divergent uses of ICTs influence movement outcomes? This study addresses these questions by examining the 2018 educator walkouts in Oklahoma and Arizona—statewide actions initiated through rank-and-file Facebook groups. To explain why the strike in Arizona was more effective than in Oklahoma, despite more auspicious conditions for success in the latter, this study shows that the impact of ICTs is mediated by leaders’ strategic choices. Whereas Oklahoma’s strike was marked by mobilization without organization—scaling up protest without an organizational foundation—Arizona used digital tools to build, rather than eschew, organization. Digital impacts further depend on the nature of the contentious performance itself, since the efficacy limitations of relying solely on ICTs are particularly pronounced for actions like strikes.