Lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations are exposed to a high risk of prejudice-motivated harm and require adequate government responses to be safe in public. Building on theories of citizenship and minority stress, the primary aim of the study was to examine cross-national variation in how cisgender sexual minority persons perceive government responses to LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) safety needs—and how that perception relates to willingness to hold hands with same-sex partners in public. The data were collected in 2019 from a cross-sectional sample of participants from all European Union members states at the time, North Macedonia, and Serbia. Across countries, the perception of inadequate government response was associated with reduced willingness to hold hands in public, and especially in Eastern and Central Europe. The association was stronger for gay and bisexual boys and men compared to lesbian and bisexual girls and women. The findings point to a chilling role of perceived government inaction on the fundamental right of sexual minority persons to participate authentically in public life.

How do authoritarian states engage with the concept of good governance, which appears normatively hostile to authoritarian rule? Although this question may seem paradoxical, empirical evidence suggests that authoritarian governments can, and often do, selectively align themselves with elements of the good governance. This dynamic becomes particularly salient in cases where international organisations actively promote good governance. Belarus, marked by a consolidating authoritarian regime and notable authoritarian resilience despite the region’s turbulence and uncertainty, offers a valuable case for examining what an autocratic government can learn from good governance initiatives, and how it may accept, adapt, and utilise them for its own purposes. This paper examines the transformation of institutions and principles associated with good governance in Belarusian public administration as promoted by international organisations during the period 2014–2025. During phases of relative political liberalisation (2008–2010 and 2015–2020), Belarus witnessed the introduction of several governance-related initiatives, many of which were supported by international actors. These reforms included administrative innovations aimed at improving efficiency, transparency, and service delivery. Following the mass protests of 2020, the ensuing political crisis, Belarus’s alignment with Russia during the war against Ukraine, and the imposition of the most severe Western sanctions in the country’s history, many of these initiatives were formally reversed or substantially curtailed. Nevertheless, despite the deteriorating political context, some international organisations and programmes aimed at promoting good governance have not ceased entirely and, in some cases, continue to operate to the present day. The paper engages with theoretical debates on good governance and authoritarian resilience, focusing on the promotion and adoption of democracy-related concepts in authoritarian contexts. It examines the strategies employed by international actors to advance good governance in Belarus and assesses the steps undertaken by the Belarusian government to introduce and retain administrative practices that can be cautiously attributed to good governance principles. The analysis compares the promotion and implementation of good governance in Belarus before and after the political crisis of 2020 and the official support of the Minsk authorities for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The paper concludes by discussing how the authoritarian Belarusian government adapts to a changing international environment and how it responds to external efforts to promote good governance. Methodologically, the study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of governance-related data with 35 in-depth expert interviews.

This contribution highlights a key cleavage present both within the concept of populism and of legality, and uses this cleavage to construct a typology that helps recognize instances where the two intersect and thus appreciate the dangers as well as the limited opportunities populism offers for maintaining and advancing democracy. Populism, for some, undermines pluralism as the lifeblood of democracy built on aspirations of reducing domination; for others, it allows to challenge dominating elites by exposing the harm they cause to ‘the people’. The concept of legality is similarly ambiguous: for some, can be used instrumentally to entrench domination; for others, legality inherently aspires to challenge domination. Combining the two conceptions allows to introduce two types of ‘legal populism’—dominating legal populism which marks instances of abuse of legality, and legal populism against domination which uses law to challenge antidemocratic elites. These are accompanied with two types where legality and populism are in conflict—extralegal populism which, in the name of the people engaged in illegal actions, and legal anti-populism which uses laws to challenge anti-pluralist tendencies. The contribution illustrates the utility of this typology in Slovakia, a country which experienced a semi-authoritarian episode shortly after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, during the so-called Mečiarist period which saw assaults on independent institutions with the aim to concentrate ruling power. The 2023 pivotal elections in Slovakia and the resultant fourth term of Prime Minister Robert Fico have once again heightened concerns of autocratization. The deterioration of democracy here was nevertheless visible already through employing anti-expert and anti-evidence policies during the COVID-19 pandemic has been accelerating since 2023, particularly due to the entrenchment of practices of corruption and oligarchic tendencies among the governing elites. As such, Slovakia offers a fertile—yet understudied—case for the study of legality and populism. The contribution argues that, in Slovakia, the aspirational reading of law finds limited footing and dominating legal populism, that uses an instrumentalist logic of legality to suppress pluralism has been the most frequent of the four types of interaction between legality and populism. This finding points to the narrow, but unexplored space for legal populism against domination, where dominating elites are called out for damaging the prospects of democratic futures for the political community. The Slovak case also raises general questions on the role of the country size, horizontal distribution of power and supranational entrenchment for the presence and prominence of the types of ‘legal populism’.