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To justify surveillance measures and gain them public support, governments use the promise of security. It is usually claimed that individuals are more willing to have freedom and privacy restricted than waiving a promise of increased security. However, empirical evidence to support this claim has been scarce - especially from a comparative perspective. Focusing on surveillance measures, this paper shows that people do indeed express greater acceptance of restrictions when these are justified by promises of security, being one of the first to examine this across 29 countries on all continents. Based on data from the ISSP, it investigates to which degree the effect of a security-based justification is moderated on the micro and macro level, with surprising results: While the effect does not differ between different levels of government support and political orientation, it differs significantly depending on how liberal-democratic the country is. The effect of the security-justification is very pronounced in liberal democracies, while it is even reversed in rather autocratic countries, meaning that individuals seem to be rather suspicious towards security justifications in non-democratic countries.

Few political transformations have attacked social inequalities more thoroughly than the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As the survey data in this article show, however, sixty years on, structural inequalities are returning that echo the prerevolutionary socioethnic hierarchies. While official Cuban statistics are mute about social differences along racial lines, the authors were able to conduct a unique, nationwide survey with more than one thousand respondents that shows the contrary. Amid depressed wages in the state-run economy, access to hard currency has become key. However, racialized migration patterns of the past make for highly unequal access to family remittances, and the gradual opening of private business disfavors Afro- Cubans, due to their lack of access to prerevolutionary property and startup capital. Despite the political continuity of Communist Party rule, a restructuring of Cuban society with a profound racial bias is turning back one of the proudest achievements of the revolution.

One of the most important features of the multi-level governance research programme is the parallel conceptualisation of the vertical and the horizontal relationships within multi-level governance systems. Different systems of multi-level governance are characterised by the relationships between political institutions on the same level (Are there many task-specific organisations?) and by the relationship between different levels (On which level do we see political communities?). By conceptualising scale and community in a substitutive way as Hooghe and Marks in tendency do, some of the potentials are lost. I put forward the suggestion that treating the two dimensions as independent would allow for an even fuller picture of the dynamics of politics in multi-level governance systems.