There is no threat to Western democracies today comparable to the rise of right-wing populism. While it has played an increasing role at least since the 1990s, only the social consequences of the global financial crises in 2008 have given it its break that led to UK’s ‘Brexit’ and the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016, as well as promoting what has been called left populism in countries that were hit the hardest by both the banking crisis and consequential neo-liberal austerity politics in the EU, such as Greece and Portugal. In 2017, the French Front National (FN) attracted many voters in the French Presidential elections; we have seen the radicalization of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and the formation of centre-right government in Austria. Further, we have witnessed the consolidation of autocratic regimes, as in the EU member states Poland and Greece. All these manifestations of right-wing populism share a common feature: they attack or even compromise the core elements of democratic societies such as the separation of powers, protection of minorities, or the rule of law. Despite a broad debate on the re-emergence of ‘populism’ in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century that has brought forth many interesting findings, a lack of sociological reasoning cannot be denied, as sociology itself withdrew from theorising populism decades ago and largely left the field to political sciences and history. In a sense, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy considers itself a contribution to begin filling this lacuna. Written in a direct and clear style, this set of volumes will be an invaluable reference for students and scholars in the field of political theory, political sociology and European Studies. This volume Concepts and Theory offers new and fresh perspectives on the debate on populism. Starting from complaints about the problems of conceptualising populism that in recent years have begun to revolve around themselves, the chapters offer a fundamental critique of the term and concept of populism, theoretically inspired typologies and descriptions of currently dominant concepts, and ways to elaborate on them. With regard to theory, the volume offers approaches that exceed the disciplinary horizon of political science that so far has dominated the debate. As sociological theory so far has been more or less absent in the debate on populism, only few efforts have been made to discuss populism more intensely within different theoretical contexts in order to explain its dynamics and processes. Thus, this volume offers critical views on the debate on populism from the perspectives of political economy and the analysis of critical historical events, the links of analyses of populism with social movement mobilisation, the significance of ‘superfluous populations’ in the rise of populism and an analysis of the exclusionary character of populism from the perspective of the theory of social closure.

This article examines the effect of parental socialization and interest in politics on entering and staying in public service careers. We incorporate two related explanations, yet commonly used in different fields of literature, to explain public sector choice. First, following social learning theory, we hypothesize that parents serve as role models and thereby affect their children's sector choice. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that parental socialization leads to a longer stay in public sector jobs while assuming that it serves as a buffer against turnover. Second, following public service motivation process theory, we expect that 'interest in politics' is influenced by parental socialization and that this concept, in turn, leads to a public sector career. A representative set of longitudinal data from the Swiss household panel (1999-2014) was used to analyse these hypotheses (n = 2,933, N = 37,328). The results indicate that parental socialization serves as a stronger predictor of public sector choice than an interest in politics. Furthermore, people with parents working in the public sector tend to stay longer in their public sector jobs. Points for practitioners For practitioners, the results of this study are relevant as they highlight the limited usefulness of addressing job applicants' interest in politics in the recruitment process. Human resources managers who want to ensure a public-service-motivated workforce are therefore advised to focus on human resources activities that stimulate public service motivation after job entry. We also advise close interaction between universities and public organizations so that students develop a realistic picture of the government as a future employer and do not experience a 'reality shock' after job entry.

Several overlapping crises which affected the EU during the past ten years have recently aggravated. Especially the progressing refugee crisis, the persisting financial crisis and geopolitical turmoil in the EU's neighbourhood contributed to the rise of anti-EU movements and diverse articulations of Euroscepticism. Although public opinion and mainstream political analysis have easily identified right-wing populism as one of the most important drivers, it is still doubtful if it can be equated with Euroscepticism without further ado. To date it is by no means clear how and where Euroscepticism exactly originates.

Studies from several countries suggest that COVID-19 vaccination rates are lower among migrants compared to the general population. Urgent calls have been made to improve vaccine outreach to migrants, however, there is limited evidence on effective approaches, especially using social media. We assessed a targeted, low-cost, Facebook campaign disseminating COVID-19 vaccine information among Arabic, Turkish and Russian speakers in Germany (N = 888,994). As part of the campaign, we conducted two randomized, online experiments to assess the impact of the advertisement (1) language and (2) depicted messenger (government authority, religious leader, doctor or family). Key outcomes included reach, click-through rates, conversion rates and cost-effectiveness. Within 29 days, the campaign reached 890 thousand Facebook users. On average, 2.3 individuals accessed the advertised COVID-19 vaccination appointment tool for every euro spent on the campaign. Migrants were 2.4 (Arabic), 1.8 (Russian) and 1.2 (Turkish) times more likely to click on advertisements translated to their native language compared to German-language advertisements. Furthermore, findings showed that government representatives can be more successful in engaging migrants online compared to other messengers, despite common claims of lower trust in government institutions among migrants. This study highlights the potential of tailored, and translated, vaccination campaigns on social media for reaching migrants who may be left out by traditional media campaigns.

High-throughput proteomics approaches have resulted in large-scale protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks that have been employed for the prediction of protein complexes. However, PPI networks contain false-positive as well as false-negative PPIs that affect the protein complex prediction algorithms. To address this issue, here we propose an algorithm called CUBCO+ that: (1) employs GO semantic similarity to retain only biologically relevant interactions with a high similarity score, (2) based on link prediction approaches, scores the false-negative edges, and (3) incorporates the resulting scores to predict protein complexes. Through comprehensive analyses with PPIs from Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Homo sapiens, we show that CUBCO+ performs as well as the approaches that predict protein complexes based on recently introduced graph partitions into biclique spanned subgraphs and outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we illustrate that in combination with GO semantic similarity, CUBCO+ enables us to predict more accurate protein complexes in 36% of the cases in comparison to CUBCO as its predecessor.