Panel 4

Youth work systems across Europe differ substantially in their institutional design, yet the consequences of this variation for social inclusion and democratic engagement remain poorly understood, particularly in post-communist contexts. This article addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of Estonia and Georgia, two countries sharing a Soviet institutional inheritance but diverging markedly in their subsequent policy trajectories. Drawing on indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and the Quality of Governance (QoG) Standard Time-Series dataset, alongside systematic analysis of national policy documents and thirteen semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in 2024 as part of the authors’ master’s thesis research at the University of Gothenburg and the co-authors field research in Georgia; the study finds that Estonia's legislatively anchored, municipally administered system generates institutional stability and formal civic participation pathways, while Georgia's donor-dependent civil society model produces culturally embedded but structurally fragile inclusion practices. Where formal provision ensures consistency yet struggles with equitable reach, grassroots initiatives offer responsiveness but remain episodic without state anchorage. These findings suggest that overcoming deep-seated participation gaps requires a hybrid institutional architecture that blends robust statutory frameworks with culturally responsive grassroots practice, a consideration of particular relevance for post-communist democracies navigating uneven civic development.

As global autocratization intensifies, democracy promotion research is increasingly shifting its focus toward the protection of democratic institutions and actors. However, systematic evidence on how international democracy promoters strategically react to autocratization processes in recipient countries remains scarce – particularly regarding macro-level quantitative evidence. We address this gap by examining whether and how donor countries adjust their democracy aid strategies in response to autocratization in recipient states. This paper contributes to the field in two ways: First, we provide a systematic quantitative mapping of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members’ democracy aid disbursements across regime transformation phases in recipient countries between 2002 and 2024. Second, we employ a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood regression (PPML) estimator with high-dimensional fixed effects to analyze how autocratization influences donor allocation strategies. For this, we construct a dyadic donor-recipient panel dataset based on OECD data and V-Dem’s Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) approach. Our preliminary findings indicate that the onset of an autocratization episode in a recipient country is associated with an increase in democracy aid disbursements in the three consecutive years. Conversely, we find that autocratizing donors reduce their democracy aid disbursements.