The heterogeneous abilities of the players in various competitive contexts often lead to undesirable outcomes such as low effort provision, lack of diversity, and inequality. A range of policies are implemented to mitigate such issues by enforcing competitive balance, i.e., leveling the playing field. While a number of such policies are aimed at increasing competition, affirmative action (AA) policies are historically practiced in an ethical response to historical discrimination against particular social groups among winners. This survey summarizes the rapidly growing literature of contest theory on AA and other policies that level the playing field. Using a general theoretical structure, we outline research on player and contest designer behavior under a multitude of policy mechanisms; and discuss the theoretical, experimental, and empirical results in relation to some of the common debates surrounding AA.

This paper presents an empirical study of the social and cultural aspects of cybersecurity capacity building in 78 nations. While nations within geographically defined regions might be expected to share similar attitudes, values, and practices around cybersecurity, this analysis finds that regional differences can be explained largely by cross-national differences in development and the scale of Internet use. These results question the centrality of regions in shaping social and cultural attributes directly tied to cybersecurity capacity. However, the analysis identifies some countries with greater and some with lesser levels of maturity in capacity building than expected only on the basis of their development and scale of Internet use. Further research focused on the dynamics of under- and over-performance of different nations might illuminate where regional contexts could place a brake on, or provide an impetus for, under- or over-performance in cybersecurity capacity building. That said, national development and the scale of Internet use are the most explanatory of cultural attitudes, values, and practices of societies tied to cybersecurity, such as trust on the Internet.

The growing centrality of cybersecurity has led many governments and international organisations to focus on building the capacity of nations to withstand threats to the public and its digital resources. These initiatives entail a range of actions that vary from education and training to technology and related standards, as well as new legal and policy frameworks. While efforts to proactively address security problems seem intuitively valuable, they are new, meaning there is relatively little research on whether they achieve their intended objectives. This paper takes a crossnational comparative approach to determine whether there is empirical support for investing in capacity-building. Marshalling field research from 73 nations, the comparative data analysis: (1) describes the status of capacity-building across the nations; (2) determines the impact of capacity-building when controlling for other key contextual variables that might provide alternative explanations for key outcomes and (3) explores the factors that are shaping national advances in capacity-building. The analysis finds a low, formative status of cybersecurity capacity in most of the nations studied and also shows that relatively higher levels of maturity translate into positive outcomes for nations. The study provides empirical support to international efforts aimed at building cybersecurity capacity.

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Parties and their elites play an important role in shaping public opinion towards European integration. As determinants of party support for European integration the literature has identified ideological and strategic electoral motives. In this article we examine the impact of economic factors on party support for European integration. We find that party support from right-wing parties is larger in countries with greater financial benefits from the EU budget. On the contrary, benefits from trade creation by the introduction of the euro as a common currency shows no significant influence on party support. In the period after the introduction of the euro we find that right-wing parties where much more Eurosceptical than left-wing parties when their country did not fulfill the Maastricht debt or deficit criteria. We also observe more support for European integration by left-wing parties in countries that would benefit from welfare state convergence due to European integration. While our analysis indicates that different economic factors always have been important to explain party support for European integration, we also find that, in the period after the financial crisis in 2008, these motives have gained importance at the expense of the ideological motives.