Social scientists and political theorists often claim that shared values are conducive to social cohesion, and trust and solidarity in particular. Furthermore, this idea is at the heart of what has been labeled the 'national identity argument', according to which religious and/or cultural diversity is a threat to the shared (national) values underpinning social cohesion and redistributive justice. However, there is no consensus among political theorists about what values we need to share to foster social cohesion and indeed, for example, nationalists, liberals, and multiculturalists provide different answers to this question. On the basis of a survey conducted in Denmark in 2014, this study empirically investigates the relation between, on the one hand, commitments to the community values of respectively conservative nationalism, liberal nationalism, liberal citizenship, and multiculturalism, and on the other, trust and solidarity. First, we investigate in what ways commitments to these four sets of values are correlated to trust and solidarity at the individual level and, then, whether the belief that others share one's values is correlated to these aspects of social cohesion for individuals committed to these four sets of values. We find that conservative and liberal nationalism are negatively correlated to our different measures of trust and solidarity, whereas liberal citizenship and (in particular) multiculturalism are positively correlated. In broad terms, this picture remains when we control for a number of socioeconomic factors and ideology (on a left-right scale). Finally, individuals who believe that others share their values do not, in general, have higher levels of trust and solidarity. Rather, this belief works in different ways when associated with different sets of community values.

Unemployment insurance funds (the 'Ghent system'), subsidized by the state and controlled by the labour movement, have contributed to high trade union densities in the Nordic countries. However, dependence on these funds as a recruiting mechanism makes trade union membership sensitive to institutional changes to unemployment insurance benefits and the institutional setup surrounding and regulating them. In this article, we investigate recent institutional changes in the three Nordic countries following the Ghent model, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, and analyse the consequences for union and fund membership. These countries have witnessed different combinations of two types of reform, less attractive unemployment benefits plus new institutional alternatives to the traditional union-run funds, and this has led to different outcomes in each country. Benefit retrenchment and increased contributions led to a sharp decline in fund membership in Sweden, whereas this trend is less pronounced in Finland and Denmark. Instead, the main trend here has been a shift from union-led to alternative forms of fund membership, but in different ways.

One premise of popular nationalism is that ascribing to a shared culture that enjoys a privileged political status enables us to construct the foundation that is vital to generating and supporting trust among members of the ethnic majority. Multiculturalism presumes that the accommodation of new minority cultures is conducive to trust. Utilising structural equation modelling, this paper distinguishes between ethnic in‐group trust (in the Danish context, trusting fellow Danes) and ethnic out‐group trust (trusting refugees and immigrants), in addition to a more generalised social trust towards unknown others. Previous studies in this field have not distinguished between these different dimensions of social trust. Results show that, vis‐à‐vis generalised trust, at the individual level, nationalism cannot compensate for lower trust towards immigrants with higher trust towards other Danes. There is some support for the ‘national identity’ argument, whereby nationalism, perceived shared values and in‐group trust are positively correlated. However, the net effect of nationalism upon generalised trust remains negative. By contrast, multiculturalism is associated with higher levels of in‐group trust and out‐group trust and ultimately of generalised trust.

The aim of this paper is to analyse how the nature of retirement is related to post-retirement life conditions among early retirees. As to the nature of retirement, we make use of the concepts of push, pull and jump to describe why individuals retire early. Push is analysed as an outcome of poor health and firings, pull as a mechanical (reflective) response to economic and symbolic signals of the welfare state, while jump is described as a reflexive process; jumpers strive for new experiences (a new life project) and/or social gains (to be more together with grandchildren). Post-retirement life conditions are analysed in a four-dimensional citizenship perspective: (a) economic, (b) social and (c) political citizenship, as well as the feeling of having (d) ‘equal social worth’ vis-à-vis fellow citizens. Results show that role transitions are strongly affected by the nature of retirement. Jumpers largely seem to be shielded from low levels of citizenship in old age. Those pushed out of the labour market indeed run a rather high risk of lacking citizenship, epitomised as loss of economic and social citizenship as well as a low sense of having equal social worth vis-á-vis fellow citizens. No conclusive results were found for older workers subject to pull. Pullers made up a rather small proportion of total sample.

This article investigates different sources of generalised trust among ethnic Danes and non-Western immigrants together with the gap in trust levels across the two groups. New survey data from Denmark were utilised, and the variables included socioeconomic resources, interethnic contact, perceptions of institutional fairness, timespan in Denmark, national identification and language proficiency. The results showed that interethnic contact and institutional fairness matter less for immigrants than for Danes vis-à-vis trust and that these variables alone do not explain the trust gap. The results also showed that their interactions with ethnicity reduce the trust gap for respondents with little interethnic contact or negative perceptions of institutions. Share of lifespan spent in Denmark also correlated negatively with social trust for immigrants. The results are discussed as the reflection of dynamic acculturation and changing expectations rather than socialisation or distinctly personal experiences.

China’s recent efforts in extending social protection resonate with the goals of the Social Protection Floor, even if Chinese policy-makers have not explicitly incorporated the Floor in the reform process. However, as this review of developments in the fields of social assistance, unemployment insurance, pensions, and health insurance suggests, major challenges persist, namely inadequate and declining benefit levels, funding issues, and fragmentation of the system, which to some degree have perpetuated existing inequalities. These challenges reflect a strong institutional heritage from the pre-reform era, which poses the biggest obstacle to the development of a coherent national social protection system.

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