Note from the Editor

Abstract

Welcome to the October 2024 issue of Politics & Policy (P&P) which features an impressive collection of scholarship spanning Europe and the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and North America. All the articles herein have undergone P&P's rigorous double-blind peer review process, commonly two or three times, which has assisted in honing the arguments significantly while also drawing out wider implications to engage specialists and generalist readers alike. They have been selected for this issue with these strengths firmly in mind.Of particular note this October are three significant themes that enticed me to recollectand then go back and read again-several past articles in this journal on similar subjects. The first theme concerns welfare policy. In the present issue, this is discussed masterfully from the perspective of balancing policy objectives in Cambodia's emergency cash assistance for workers during COVID-19 (Soksamphoas & Ford, 2024) and comparing party discourse and conflict on welfare solidarity in Sweden, Belgium (Flanders), and the United States (Luypaert & Thijssen, 2024; cf. Son, 2020). These exceptional pieces join a long line of past P&P articles on comparative welfare state studies, including social policy and unemployment in the United Kingdom and Italy (Mioni, 2021), welfare state culture and policy discourse (König, 2015), and Wagle's (2014) weighty contribution on population heterogeneity and welfare policies in high-income OECD countries, among many others (see e.g., Butz & Kehrberg, 2015;Flavin et al., 2011;Polacko, 2023).The second salient theme emerging this October surrounds the intersection of violence, quality of democracy concerns, and political participation in sub-Saharan Africa. In this issue the studies by Omulo (2024) and Iheonu et al. (2024) join the burgeoning repository of P&P's past papers on violence and democratization in Africa (see e.g.