Swiss citizens approve of their government and the way democracy is practiced; they trust the authorities and are satisfied with the range of services Swiss governments provide. This is quite unusual when compared to other countries. This open access book provides insight into the organization and the functioning of the Swiss state. It claims that, beyond politics, institutions and public admin…
This Open Access book offers a novel perspective on the role of quantification in the making of education utopias through an analysis of expert knowledge and its producers. Drawing on empirical findings from the European Research Council funded project ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (METRO, 2017-2022), Education, Quantification and Utopia focuses o…
This open access book offers the first in-depth study of the history and current debates surrounding electronic cigarettes comparing the UK, US and Australia. Since their introduction, e-cigarettes have been the subject of much public, media and regulatory attention, with discussion centring on whether these devices encourage or discourage smoking. This study delves into the history of policyma…
India has learned what to do and what not to do when it comes to implementing policy to address human suffering. The COVID-19 pandemic unified the international response in similar ways, and the world has a lot to learn about key initiatives in India that have been implemented since India's independence. This open-access book includes key learnings about the conceptualization, design, and impac…
This book is open access under a CC BY license. The first of its kind, this Open Access 'Report' is a first step in assessing the state of the humanities worldwide. Based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews the book discusses the value of the humanities, the nature of humanities research and the relation between humanities and politics, amongst other issues.
This open access book conceptualises the Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures that connect numbers, networks and governing paradigms.The book approaches quantification not merely as a tool for governing, but rather as a broader epistemic system through which global public policy is produced. This book focuses on the role of international organisations in shaping and implem…
This open access book examines how civil society organizations in Poland, Russia, and Sweden (re)act to transformations of opportunities and limitations in access to various forms of resources. The volume’s contributions discuss the constraints associated with different types of resources as well as organizations’ capacities to generate resources—or compensate for their lack—as they neg…
This Open Access book aims to find out how and why states in various regions and of diverse cultural backgrounds fail in their gender equality laws and policies. In doing this, the book maps out states’ failures in their legal systems and unpacks the clashes between different levels and forms of law—namely domestic laws, local regulations, or the implementation of international law, individ…
This open access edited volume introduces the concept of causal mechanisms to explore new ways of explaining the global dynamics of social policy, and shows that a mechanism-based approach provides several advantages over established approaches for studying social policy. The introductory chapter outlines the mechanism-based approach, which stands out by modularisation and a clear focus…
This open access book turns the research attention of social policy scholars and long-term care researchers from comparative descriptions of care systems, focusing mostly on expenditures and volumes of long-term care services, to outcomes, and in particular to the question whether older people really receive the support that they need. Without knowledge about which needs and which social groups…