The literature on new modes of governance suffers from a gap between the normative and the positive approaches to legitimacy. This article addresses this gap by studying the patterns of national stakeholders' support for the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The results of our survey...

We seek to shape an agenda for the growing interest in using sociological approaches to study the European Union (EU). In order to deepen and broaden the Europeanization agenda, the article points to how sociology can help reveal the ‘social bases’ of European integration (i.e....

Abstract In this introductory essay for the special issue on contested spaces in liberal democracies, we review how and to what extent the closing or shrinking space debate that has influenced the civil society discourse in authoritarian contexts presents an appropriate mode of analysis for...

This article puts forward a constructivist-interpretivist approach to interface conflicts that emphasises how international actors articulate and problematise norm collisions in discursive and social interactions. Our approach is decidedly agency-oriented and follows the Special Issue’s...

Despite the widespread sense that backlash is an important feature of contemporary national and world politics, there is remarkably little scholarly work on the politics of backlash. This special issue conceptualises backlash politics as a distinct form of contentious politics. Backlash politics...