This article reconstructs and analyses the conceptual history of “the people” [Folket] in modern Danish history. It applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze new data and archival materials and provides a detailed study of the construction, development and central role of populist conceptions of “the people” in the constitutional struggles between 1830 and 1920 that transformed Denmark from an absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. I argue that these populist conceptualizations of “the people” shaped and fostered the emergence of the ideas and practices of parliamentary democracy as “the people’s rule” [Folkestyre]. This case study thereby challenges contemporary assumptions about an inherently adversarial relationship between populism and democracy. Moreover, it makes a number of empirical and analytical contributions to the existing historiography, as well as the literature on the construction of “the people,” democracy and populism.

The distinctive features of the modern form of citizenship include, among other things, that it is both internally inclusive and externally exclusive; that it establishes legal equality so that membership of the state supersedes all other memberships and allegiances; and that it defines membership as independent of residence. These characteristics largely evolved during the “long nineteenth century”, the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. Similar to that of today, the historical situation in which citizenship evolved was one of intensified mobility. With the example of Sweden, this article finds that citizenship, in both its internal and external dimensions, was elaborated partly as a way to manage the mobility of the migrant poor. The contours of citizenship emerged as authorities aimed to control and direct the movement of the poor, which preceded control efforts. This has implications for our understanding of citizenship as well as of the state, and highlights the agency of migrants.

This paper combines life course theory and empirical research on the collateral consequences of punishment as a backdrop to exploring the relationship between both the presence of and seriousness of a criminal record measured in early adulthood (age 25) and later life outcomes (ages 41-49), both in total and by socioeconomic status. The analysis relies on a combination of longitudinal survey data and administrative register data for 2,022 individuals who were between 12 and 20 years old when the data collection started. Results show that the criminal record is linked to both labor market and social exclusion later in life, but most systematically to (worse) labor market outcomes. Somewhat surprisingly, low SES seems to “buffer” against some of the unwanted outcomes linked to having a more serious criminal record, while high SES seems to “boost” others. Implications for future research on both deviance and stratification are discussed.

How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession’s claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. These analyses reveal how a structural rapprochement between macroeconomics and finance created the new subfield of macro-finance. We show that contributions by central bank economists, driven by central banks’ newly acquired macroprudential mandate, were key to its establishment. Acting within the space of regulatory science, they connected macroeconomic and financial knowledge to satisfy their employers’ administrative needs, while also helping to bridge the gaping hole in economic discourse, thereby taking on an important stabilizing role for the epistemic authority of economics.