How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect citizens’ democratic preferences? Were the changes persistent or temporary? We track a representative sample of Spanish citizens before, during, and after the pandemic, with eight survey waves from January 2020 to January 2024. We compare democratic attitudes before and after the pandemic with individual fixed effects models. We identify a sharp increase in preferences for technical rather than ideological policy-making at the very onset of the pandemic, as well as significant changes in voters’ preferences for competent rather than honest politicians. These changes are sudden and persistent over 4 years. Using a set of repeated survey experiments, we also document a widespread willingness to sacrifice rights and freedoms to deal with the pandemic as compared to other global threats, such as international terrorism and climate change. But this effect quickly faded over time. Overall, we identify significant changes in democratic attitudes during the pandemic and a durable shift in technocratic preferences that outlived the pandemic, setting the conditions for the long-term legacies of COVID-19 on democracy.

With the widespread democratic decline and the rise of autocratic regimes, global humanitarian assistance efforts have often fallen short of expectations. Historical humanitarian assistance efforts have changed, becoming less effective, or disappearing. Given the direction that global health crisis risks are taking today, it is crucial that diplomatic, structural, logistical, security, and operational questions be asked and appropriate global solutions sought for the future management of pandemics and climate change crises.

Centralisation of powers typically occurs in times of crisis. The paper investigates and compares the intergovernmental relations (IGRs) in the Italian decentralised systems during the economic and financial crisis (2008–2013) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022). During both these two phases, Italy experienced a transition from a political government to a technical one. During the economic and financial crisis, Silvio Berlusconi's government (2008–2011) was succeeded by a technical one led by Mario Monti (2011–2013); similarly, during the pandemic, Giuseppe Conte's government (2020–2021) was followed by a technical one led by Mario Draghi (2021–2022). The hypothesis is that the presence of ‘political’ governments still guarantees a certain degree of cooperation with lower levels of government (i.e. regional and local administrations), while ‘technical’ governments further exacerbate the centralisation of powers. The paper analyses the legislative activities of the central government and the documents of the Italian ‘conference system’ during the two periods of analysis. According to our hypothesis, the findings show a greater centralisation of power under the technical government during the pandemic, but not during the economic crisis. This outcome suggests that the policy domain may serve as a main intervening factor over the degree of centralization of the IGRs during periods of crisis.

This analysis explores the impact of the Myanmar earthquake on March 28, 2025 and its subsequent effects on Thailand and Myanmar by collecting and synthesizing data on immediate casualties, infrastructural damage, humanitarian needs, disaster preparedness in both countries, and relevant theoretical concepts. The earthquake in Myanmar has created a major humanitarian crisis, compounded by existing weaknesses, while the effects in Thailand have highlighted significant gaps in urban safety protocols. Differences in preparedness and societal awareness have influenced the outcomes in each country, emphasizing the urgent need to strengthen resilience capacities across the affected region.

Global crises constitute challenges for social policy. While social policy is predominantly a national concern, international organisations (IOs) contribute frames of reference for state decisions. In this article, we explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in IOs’ social policy ideas and recommendations in health care, labour market, and social protection policies due to how IOs perceived the crisis’ specific nature, severity, and global scope. We focus on four IOs regarded as key actors in global social policy, namely the ILO, OECD, WHO, and the World Bank. Theoretically, we employ a framework of ideational policy change combining different levels (recommendations – including parameters and instruments – and paradigmatic ideas) with different types of change (layering, conversion, dismantlement, and displacement). We find that IOs have not fundamentally reimagined their pre-pandemic stances during the pandemic. The IOs’ perceptions of the crisis do not undermine IOs’ ideas and recommendations but highlight their appropriateness.

The escalating dengue crisis in Peru demands immediate action from global health organizations, health care authorities, and government officials. Endemic to Peru, dengue has seen a drastic increase in cases, with the largest outbreak on record occurring in the first half of 2023, resulting in 139 366 confirmed cases and 381 deaths. Despite efforts to contain the outbreak through integrated surveillance and response strategies, the crisis worsened in 2024 due to drastic climate changes, exacerbating conditions for dengue transmission. Heavy rains since December 2023 have caused flooding and landslides, creating ideal breeding grounds for dengue vectors. Overwhelmed local authorities, especially in areas with limited access to public services due to floods and landslides, struggle to manage the crisis. With more than half the population at risk of dengue infection, urgent measures are required to control the spread of dengue and mitigate increasing mortality rates. Targeted interventions in areas with limited health care access are crucial, considering underreporting and limitations of health systems, to accurately assess the true burden of the disease and prevent further escalation of the crisis.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

Parliaments are the intermediate link in the representative chain connecting citizens to the government. The parliamentary agenda is often seen as highly responsive because public priorities are usually mirrored in parliamentary debates. However, the level of responsiveness is affected by formal and informal rules of each activity, which considerably shape the attention–concentration capacity and thus the possibility for policy change. During moments of crisis, institutional frictions can be substantially placated, making the agenda concentrating on the crisis issue even in the presence of high institutional frictions. Building on the literature about parliamentary questioning and agenda-setting studies, this article compares the determinants of issue attention for crisis-related issues (economic, migration, and pandemic) in the Italian case over the past 20 years, assessing their impact on written questions and oral questions with immediate response. This article overcomes a limitation of the agenda-setting literature which treats different forms of parliamentary questions as having a single logic and dynamic. Instead, we demonstrate that frictions are extremely variable among different forms of parliamentary questioning and thus, that written and oral questions exhibit different forms of issue responsiveness. This article explores which type of signal parliamentary questions are most responsive to – public concerns, media attention, or real-world indicators – and finds that the answer is highly conditional both on the specific issue under examination and the type of parliamentary questions.

Emergency law serves the dual purpose of granting public authorities the powers to respond to emergencies whilst simultaneously limiting the use of such powers so as to prevent their abuse. To this end, it is crucial that emergency law clearly outlines its own scope by delimiting the grounds that permit the invocation of emergency powers. This article argues that defining those grounds requires distinguishing emergency from normalcy and disentangling it from the broader notion of crisis. Accordingly, the contribution investigates the extent to which a definition of emergency can be accommodated within EU constitutional law. To do so, it draws on examples from European emergency law, understood as encompassing both EU Member States’ laws and the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The article shows that the vague emergency terminology employed in the EU Treaties hinders the identification of a horizontal definition of emergency and risks casting doubt on the constitutional legitimacy of emergency responses by the Union and its Member States.