ABSTRACT The article examines whether social protection programmes meant for poverty reduction have any impact on income distribution across households in India using the social accounting matrix for the year 2022-2023. The analysis focuses on three social protection programmes, viz. the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) and National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP). Sponsored by the central government, these programmes have distinct features and significance within India’s social security framework. The findings show that the indirect income effect is higher than the direct income effect of expenses under these programmes, indicating a strong multiplier effect driven by production and consumption linkages. While the direct income transfers are made in favour of the poor households, the richer households in both rural and urban areas receive larger indirect income arising from inter-sectoral linkages, higher skills and ownership of productive assets. Nevertheless, the total income effect of targeted beneficiaries remains higher than that of other household classes due to a larger direct income effect. It causes marginal changes in income distribution across households, indicating the distributional impact of social protection programmes.

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of international party assistance and transnational networks on political parties in hybrid regimes, focusing on Georgia and Moldova. Using qualitative research, including interviews with party representatives and donor organisations, it argues that while such support sustains party operations, it also shifts accountability away from domestic constituencies toward international actors. In particular, opposition parties, often excluded from national media and policymaking, increasingly rely on European party networks for visibility and legitimacy. However, this reliance has limited grassroots engagement and weakens parties’ societal linkages. So while transnational alliances and party assistance provide vital resources and platforms for the exchange of ideas, they risk reinforcing donor-centric rather than citizen-centred accountability, threatening the long-term effectiveness of democracy promotion in hybrid regimes.

ABSTRACT Decades of research have shown that, in the US, Census-measured racial and ethnic minority groups are often environmentally disadvantaged such that they live with worse pollution and with fewer ameliorating green amenities; these are the traditional environmental (in)justice (EJ/EI) findings. However, race and ethnicity are not the only attributes that trigger discriminatory behavior. For example, throughout more than 1000 years, in many countries, including the US, minority religious affiliation has also been the subject of discriminatory response. Recognizing this has led to recent research on whether religious minorities in the US might also suffer from environmental injustice, such that they, like racial and ethnic minorities, are disproportionately exposed to environmental disamenities. Two recent studies, one of the state of California, and one looking at air pollution in the contiguous United States, have both found evidence of just such a religious EI effect, in particular in areas surrounding the houses of worship of both Jews and Muslims. This analysis extends these findings by examining Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) facilities in the contiguous US at the level of the Census Block Group, and finds that the presence of Muslim houses of worship, in particular, are strongly associated with nearness to TRI facilities.

ABSTRACT This special issue introduction explores the global governance of commercial actors in data-intensive health innovation. While commercial entities are foundational to data-intensive health innovation processes and products, their dominance raises critical concerns regarding the distribution of benefits, the accrual of value, and the control of digital infrastructures. The authors define “commercial actors” broadly to include technology companies, venture capital firms, and health organizations engaging in market-driven innovation. Through an analysis of contributions spanning North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, the introduction explores three key themes: the tension between private and public value, the path-dependent nature of commercialized digital infrastructures, and the necessity for global coordination across fragmented governance layers. After summarizing the contributions to the special issue, the article calls for a multifaceted, ecosystem-based approach to align commercial practices with public safety, ethics, and universal health values.

ABSTRACT This article explores agenda-setting dynamics in the field of perinatal health care in England. Specifically, it analyses the 2024 Birth Trauma Inquiry, which launched after a high-profile campaign spearheaded by then-Member of Parliament Theo Clarke. The article uses the Multiple Streams Framework (Kingdon 2003) to understand how the inquiry led to agenda-setting success, despite numerous previous investigations and media coverage of maternity scandals. It draws on semi-structured interviews with five key actors, as well as extensive secondary and primary data. The article adds to our knowledge of feminist policy studies and agenda-setting on issues that are hidden, taboo, and previously not part of mainstream public discourse. Its key insights concern the importance of a well-connected political figure to push for change; the integral supporting role of advocacy organizations; issue expansion and framing of birth trauma; the use of evidence generated from an open call to the public; and extensive behind-the-scenes political consensus-building and media engagement.

ABSTRACT This study examines how crisis governance in China mediates the tension between administrative resilience and participatory-democratic backsliding through a comparative analysis of Wuhan and Shanghai during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on government directives, media reports, and citizen feedback, the research explores how emergency responses affected transparency, citizen engagement, and institutional adaptability. The analysis reveals two contrasting governance logics: Wuhan’s coercion-then-correction model, marked by rigid centralization and subsequent adjustment, and Shanghai’s flexibility-then-retrenchment model, characterized by initial local experimentation followed by renewed central control. Despite these differences, both cities ultimately normalized emergency infrastructures, such as digital health codes and grid management, blurring the boundary between temporary crisis response and routine administration. The findings demonstrate that administrative resilience and democratic backsliding are not mutually exclusive: adaptive governance can legitimize expanded surveillance and reduced deliberation, thereby embedding exceptional controls into ordinary governance. Situating China’s experience within broader debates on hybrid regimes, the study shows how crisis governance in authoritarian contexts can simultaneously enhance bureaucratic competence and consolidate centralized authority. The article concludes that transparency, local accountability, and equity in public service delivery are essential to sustaining resilience without eroding democratic norms.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how politically motivated imprisonments of opposition figures affect exchange-rate movements in emerging economies. While much of the existing research treats political shocks as events that occur outside the economic system, this study argues that they are part of it – endogenous signals that shape how investors interpret macroeconomic fundamentals. Drawing on signalling theory and the idea of institutional uncertainty, the paper explains how political actions that weaken judicial independence and legal credibility increase perceived risk and reduce policy coherence. Using a Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) approach, the analysis estimates the impact of these imprisonments in Turkey, Malaysia, and Brazil, comparing actual exchange-rate paths with synthetic counterfactuals. Across all three countries, the results show a clear pattern of currency depreciation and rising volatility following such events. These findings suggest that when institutional trust erodes, the consequences reach well beyond politics – directly into financial stability.

ABSTRACT This study addresses a central puzzle in comparative education policy: why do governance reforms succeed in some institutional contexts but fail in others? This study examines how governance capacity shapes education reform implementation across 157 countries from 1789 to 2024. The findings identifies nonlinear capacity-reform relationships characterized by critical governance thresholds at which modest governance improvements generate disproportionate implementation gains. Below these thresholds, reforms achieve limited traction regardless of resources; within transition zones, returns to capacity-building investments prove substantial; at advanced levels, political and coordination factors supersede administrative capacity. This study reveals strengthening governance-reform linkages as institutional frameworks mature. Colonial administrative legacies impose persistent implementation constraints through fragmented authority structures and resource allocation inefficiencies. These findings carry direct implications for targeting capacity-building assistance, explaining cross-national implementation variance, and designing context-appropriate reform strategies. This study extends institutional theory while providing empirical foundations for matching education reforms to governance realities across diverse contexts.

ABSTRACT The primary purpose of this article is to identify and describe political polarization in Armenia, the factors that have contributed to its development and modes of its manifestation. To this end, on the one hand, we seek to understand the nature, scale, and causes of polarization, including using the methods of content analysis and public surveys, and, on the other hand, with the help of in-depth interviews, to understand the positions of the ruling and opposition parties regarding this phenomenon. In-depth interviews also help us understand the (lack of) readiness, intention and resources among the Armenian political parties to overcome political split and polarization. The article also explains the actual and potential role of foreign and international organizations in supporting the institutionalization of political parties and overcoming political polarization. Our findings suggest support for the correlation between polarization and democratic decline, particulalry due to decline of trust, mutual securitization of poles that normalizes each others' illebaeral treatment and partisan willingness of voters to tolerate wrongdoings of the party they support.

ABSTRACT The relationship between school choice and segregation remains a contentious issue in both academic and policy spheres. In recent years, the redesign of school choice policies has gained traction as a strategy to mitigate their negative impacts on school segregation. In this context, Barcelona (Spain) implemented desegregation policies in 2019, primarily based on redesigning specific school choice policy instruments to reduce the uneven distribution of socially disadvantaged students among schools. This study examines the impact of these policies on school segregation and explores how their effectiveness varies according to the characteristics of different areas within the city. The findings indicate that desegregation policies have reduced the uneven distribution of socially disadvantaged students and their isolation in specific schools. However, our results also show that, in each area, impacts are mediated by factors such as residential segregation, the enrolment in subsidized private schools, the share of students schooling outside their educational area, and the prevalence of siblings already attending a school, which confers priority access in admissions. We argue that the relative success of Barcelona’s school choice reform in addressing school segregation lies in its shift from a coordinated to a controlled choice model.