This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

Opposition to sexual minority rights in Poland is among the highest in the EU. Populist political actors in the country repeatedly scapegoat gays and lesbians, presenting them as a threat to the Polish nation and its shared norms and values, particularly those derived from religion. Building upon previous research which shows how discourse constructing homosexuality as a threat to the nation has been used by social and political actors to legitimize homophobic rhetoric and behaviour, our paper shows whether nationalism—understood here as national collective narcissism—predicts prejudice towards gays and lesbians at the level of individual beliefs.

The article examines the controversy triggered by the “Victory Tour” of Russia’s high-profile biker organization, the Night Wolves, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The tour provoked important questions about the relationship between European borders and the politics of World War II commemoration. The article argues that the international public discourse around the Night Wolves illuminates how state borders are being transformed both as hard, territorialized borders and as “soft,” symbolic boundaries. The analysis compares how print and online media in Russia, Poland, and Germany framed the Night Wolves’ tour across Europe. It emphasizes the construction of borders as a narrative project and maps the symbolic boundary-drawing strategies mobilized by various actors. It shows how cross-border commemorative tours can serve as a tool of transnational memory politics that shapes the very meaning and salience of state borders and regional divisions.

The state of research on legal compliance in socio-legal studies is limited and partially outdated. Like theories on coercion, recognition, or legitimacy, notions around compliance with the law appear plausible in themselves. However, each of them hold only part of the explanation and yet they cannot be reconciled due to theoretical incompatibilities. Legal sociologists therefore speak of a theory gap regarding legal compliance. The following article takes on this research desideratum and attempts to formulate an alternative concept of legal compliance based on an entirely new terminology without, however, completely renouncing the previous findings of legal sociology. Relying on the above-mentioned theory gap alongside the introduction of this new terminology, I argue that it is possible to analyze legal compliance while heuristically integrating all previous theoretical concepts of its. As a starting point, the article draws on Bourdieu’s fragmentary sociology of law and, by extending it, proposes a larger practice and field-theory-based interpretation of compliance.

Recent sociological scholarship on market design is ill-equipped to understand the normative and political aspects of experts’ practices in connection to political conflicts over the commodification of social rights. I develop an original approach to the politicized use of market devices to address collective concerns in a noneconomic policy field: education. When designing a high-stakes school accountability system, policymakers in Chile confronted a moral conundrum: should schools be valued according to their students’ absolute proficiency, or according to the school’s relative effectiveness? Progressive and conservative experts in charge of settling this dilemma pushed for using the statistical model (OLS vs. HLM) that yielded rankings that fit their moral preferences. Through qualitative analyses of experts’ real-world application of quantitative methods, as well as experts’ interpretations of these methods’ performative consequences, I mobilize the much-debated concept of “moral background” to unravel the conditions for subsuming ideological dissent into consensual forms of decision-making.