The Covid‐19 pandemic brought unprecedented governmental restrictions to personal and political freedoms. This article investigates individual‐level differences in mass support for the restriction of civil liberties during the first wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Employing theories of affect and decision making, it assesses the extent to which different emotional reactions toward the pandemic influenced attitudes toward mobile phone surveillance and the implementation of curfews. We test our hypotheses in five advanced European democracies using panel data which allow us to identify the role of emotions in support for restrictive policies controlling for individual heterogeneity. The results suggest that experiencing fear about Covid‐19 had a strong positive impact on supporting these measures, while hope and anger only played a minimal role. Importantly, the findings indicate that emotions moderate the impact of trust toward the government, a key variable for supporting the restriction of civil liberties during the pandemic. Specifically, experiencing fear was associated with higher acceptance of civil liberty restrictions. Further, experiencing fear substantially decreased the effect of trust in the government, rendering those who lack trust toward the government more supportive of civil liberty restrictions. These findings help us understand the psychological mechanisms that leads citizens to swiftly decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threat. Further, they offer empirical support for the causal role of affect in political decision‐making.

Religion is now politically active in ways that until recently were unthinkable. Both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, there are numerous examples of how religion has left its previously assigned place in the private sphere, becoming in some cases an important contributor to various political issues, conflicts and competitions. To understand what has happened in this regard necessarily involves a remodelling and re-assumption of our understanding of the public roles of religious actors. Until the 1960s or 1970s, theories of secularization had long condemned religious actors in both Western and non-Western countries to social and political marginalization. Secularization theory maintained that as countries modernized, religion would lose its public centrality. But, as this did not happen, there is now a need to rethink the public role of religion. This article is concerned with this issue, with a focus on Europe, using democratization, democracy and civil liberties as key examples.

There are emergent interests on the dynamics of counter-terrorism measures (CTMs) at global, regional and national levels, particularly with respect to how CTMs intersect with and shape state–civil society relations. Using a descriptive research design, this study examines how the implementation of CTMs influences the dynamics of state–civil society relations in Nigeria. The stratified random sampling was used to select 205 programme officers of civil society organizations (CSOs), while purposive sampling was used to select 29 executive directors of CSOs for in-depth interviews. The descriptive statistics and content analysis were used to analyse the data. The findings show that the capacity of CSOs to contribute to CTM is shaped by the politics that places CSOs in the service of the government. Their positioning helps establish an environment of conviviality in which CSOs advance the interest of the state in the context of counter-terrorism, and in turn, the state engages and endorses CSOs. The paper argues that CTMs are increasingly impinging on the operations of CSOs in Nigeria, thus constraining the autonomous space that defines CSOs that lie at the intersection of state and society.

The extent to which the English common law protected civil liberties in the past is widely debated. Were the judges protectors of core freedoms such as liberty and the right to protest or were they allies of the executive in their hostility towards them? Since at least Dicey, the common law has had a vision of itself as the former, but what does practice reveal? This article explores the many ways in which the advocates of female suffrage in the 10 years or so before the First World War interacted with executive and judicial authority in their effort to use what they saw as their ancient freedoms to protect their campaigning for the vote for women. The suffragette campaign generated a series of conflicts between the judicial and executive branches of the state while also testing the depth of the common law’s commitment to civil liberties.

This essay contributes to the Forum on Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy. It considers the book’s contribution to the history of political economy by exploring anarchists’ politics of political economy–the political ideas and practices they deployed to topple industrial capitalism and the powerful American state that fueled it.

Public health emergencies sometimes require the restriction of civil liberties through social distancing: lockdowns, quarantines, the closure of public spaces and institutions, and so on. Social distancing measures can decrease mortality and morbidity, but they also cause social and economic harm. Policymakers have to make trade-offs between “lives and livelihoods,” while introducing only minimally necessary restrictions on civil liberties. Traditionally, cost-benefit analysis has played a central role in formulating these trade-offs. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that the trade-offs should instead be made on the basis of contractualist moral theory. In this essay, I argue against the use of contractualism for this purpose.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) positioning and integrity monitoring models and algorithms currently generically assume that measurement errors follow a Gaussian distribution. As this is not always the case, there is a trade-off affecting system safety and availability, emphasising the need for better error characterisation in mission-critical applications. Research to date has shown advantages of Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) distribution for mapping extreme events. However, it is more complex than the Gaussian distribution, especially in the error convolution process. This paper derives a distribution, referred to as the GEV-based Gaussian distribution, that benefits from the advantages of both the GEV and Gaussian distributions in mapping extreme events and simplicity, respectively. The proposed distribution is tested against Gaussian, GEV and Generalised t distribution. The results show that the proposed distribution can provide a better bound for extreme events than the tested distribution both for pseudorange and carrier phase errors.

When establishing constitutional rules that regulate political parties, liberal democracies struggle between civil liberties—thus tolerating anti-democratic parties—and potential threats of democratic breakdown, which can be reduced by prosecuting and prohibiting anti-democratic parties. We suggest that liberal democracies must balance false positives and false negatives by combining ex ante and ex post regulatory mechanisms. By making use of a unique dataset of thirty-seven liberal democracies collected by the authors, we find empirical results consistent with our positive theory. An extensive review of the normative debate and case law provides additional qualitative support.

Wartime pressures to protect national military and security interests inevitably create threats to civil liberties. This essay reviews the abuses of the period, carried on by public officials as well as citizens who saw themselves as acting on their behalf. There was a remarkable range of targets—with few spies to find, broadly defined disloyalty sufficed. The attempt to create a unified, loyal culture extended to wide areas of the culture, such as the teaching of history, aided by volunteers. The public and private efforts brought ruined reputations, imprisonments, public shaming, murders, and awful behavior on the part of courts and citizens. These were bad times for civil liberties. This essay reviews the history and explores the legacies.

The analysis examines the effort to incorporate labor rights into the American conception of civil liberties and the opposition to that endeavor. It focuses on three Senators—Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, Jr., and Elbert Thomas—and New Deal officials who conceived of the National Labor Relations Act as a cornerstone of the effort to achieve “economic justice” and defended the law against its critics. It examines the opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers and an anticommunist alliance between southern Democrats and Republicans. An ideological counteroffensive recast the supporters of social rights as un-American opponents of free enterprise and defined civil liberties as protecting the individual from an expansionist state and labor bosses. The analysis demonstrates the multiple causes for the disappearance of ideological space for conceiving that protection from oppressive employers constituted a civil liberty and the displacement of labor rights by the “right to work.”

Research from the United States has shown that the 9/11 terrorist attacks activated individuals’ ethnocentric predispositions to structure public opinion toward several political and social issues. Beyond this overall finding, several aspects of the activation hypothesis remain unexplored, including its geographical and substantive scope. Using the quasi-random timing of terrorist attacks during the collection of the 2016 GGSS, we demonstrate the terrorism-induced activation of ethnocentrism in Germany. Specifically, a cascade of terrorist attacks involving immigrants in the summer of 2016 activated ethnocentrism among native Germans to predict (lower) support for civil liberties relative to security concerns after its influence had been absent just a month before. Further, we show that the activation of ethnocentrism holds up in a series of robustness checks and is not explained by alternative factors, including other predispositions.