This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century.

The British system of quality assessment of research in universities, known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), has recently been the subject of major public policy review and debate. The system of research quality or performance assessment has been running for over twenty years, although many of its facets have changed as has the increasingly marketised political economy. Nevertheless, the UK RAE has been the prototype for the growth and development of such systems internationally, although how different countries have conceived of such forms of review has varied greatly. The question of the relationship between research quality in higher education and the public funding of research lies at the heart of what has become a contentious and acrimonious debate in the UK. While these issues can be seen as fundamentally about social and economic matters, in fact the social sciences as an organised group of subjects or interests have not played a key role in the public arena. This article outlines the contours of the recent debates in the UK, by comparison and contrast with the ways in which such systems of performance and quality assessment have been debated inter alia in Australia, New Zealand, France and the Netherlands. In essence, the issues have centred upon questions of measurement of performance known as metrication, and bibliometrics versus social judgments about research quality.

In 2005 the American Council on Education asked the American Political Science Association (APSA) to work towards internationalising undergraduate education. Since almost a decade has passed since these initial efforts, it is crucial to examine how far the discipline has come in internationalising the curriculum. This article will discuss and evaluate how to assess and understand what faculty, departments, and schools have done in pursuing the internationalisation of the undergraduate curriculum through the use of an online survey. It will examine the process of creating the survey instrument and the issues around doing so. The results of the survey, while not the focus here, will inform this discussion in the article. Competing definitions of internationalisation, differences in conceptualisation from American and other, mostly European, perspectives, and questions about how to internationalise at the course, department, or programme level were issues that the survey revealed needed more discussion. Moreover, the article seeks to discuss how to move forward in the assessment of internationalisation efforts.

Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage, and it is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. However, since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi‐presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this article a principal‐agent theoretical explanation is proposed. Data are examined on 28 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies in Europe that shows that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal‐agent relationships between voters, elected politicians and governments that characterise Europe's semi‐presidential and parliamentary regimes.

This paper uses non-traditional approaches to predict why volunteers remain in or quit a non-governmental organisation position. A questionnaire featuring 55 predictors was conducted via an online survey mechanism from March to May 2021. A total of 250 responses were received. The subsequent data analysis compared logistic regression and artificial neural network results, using machine-learning interpreters to explain the features which determined decisions. The results indicate greater accuracy for neural networks. According to the logistic regression results, intrinsic motivation, volunteering through an NGO and the age of volunteers influenced the intention to remain. Moreover, NGOs that offered online volunteering opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic had higher rates of intention to remain. However, the neural network analysis, performed using the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) method, indicated the need to consider different predictors to those identified by the logistic regression. The LIME method also enables the individualisation of the explanations of predictions, indicating the importance of considering the role of volunteers’ feelings in both quit and remain decisions, which is something that is not provided by traditional methods such as logistic regression. Furthermore, the LIME approach demonstrates that NGOs must address both volunteer management and experience to retain volunteers. Nonetheless, volunteer management is more critical to stop volunteers quitting, suggesting that volunteer integration is crucial.

John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) constitutes a powerful tool for understanding the policy process, and more specifically, agenda‐setting, through three separate streams: problems, policies and politics. This article argues that the MSF would benefit from further development of the problem stream. It introduces a clearer conception of agency into the problem stream by suggesting the inclusion of the problem broker. The problem broker is a role in which actors frame conditions as public problems and work to make policy makers accept these frames. The problem broker makes use of knowledge, values and emotions in the framing of problems. The use of these three elements is seen as a prerequisite for successful problem brokering – that is, for establishing a frame in the policy sphere. Other important factors are: persistence, access to policy makers, credibility and willingness. Problem brokers also need to know who to talk to, how and when in order to make an impact. The context, in terms of, for example, audience and national mood, is also crucial. The inclusion of the problem broker into the MSF strengthens the analytical separation between streams. According to Kingdon, policies can be developed independently from problems. The MSF, therefore, enables a study of policy generation. The inclusion of the problem broker, in the same sense, makes it possible to investigate problem framing as a separate process and enables a study of actors that frame problems without making policy suggestions. The MSF is, in its current form, not able to capture what these actors do. The main argument of this article is that it is crucial to study these actors as problem framing affects the work of policy entrepreneurs and, thereby, agenda‐setting and decision making.

The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling with what race and racism mean as theoretical concepts, how we can both address the study of race and act against racist practices in our discipline, and how to work on being not just ‘less racist’ but indeed antiracist in every aspect of our intellectual, professional, and personal lives. We are challenged to think about how we can center the lives and experiences of people of various racial backgrounds, rather than primarily centering whiteness, in linguistics departments. In doing so, we must more directly ask the question: how would linguistics have to change in order for more people from various racial groups to actively want to study, teach, and learn linguistics? We also need to emphasize that these are necessarily intersectional issues and that racialization is intimately tied to inequities on the basis of gender identity, socioeconomic status, disability, citizenship, and other parameters of social difference.

The object of this article is to provide a profile of the development of political science in Slovenia and, in particular, to analyse the effects of the political democratisation process that coincided with the disintegration of Yugoslavia on the evolution of the discipline in the new state. Political science in Slovenia is a relatively young discipline, having been recognised as an autonomous academic field only after World War II. Of course, the roots and prehistory of the discipline stretch back much further into the past. They are to be found in Slovenian intellectual, social and political history, especially in the era of enlightenment in the eighteenth century, when the idea of political science was, perhaps for the first time, explicitly mentioned in Slovenian history in the sense of a field to be explored.

NGOs have taken up an increasing number of roles and responsibilities in Latin American societies. Based on a study of the multi-stakeholder platform, the Water Resources Forum in Ecuador, this paper shows how through the creation of a broad network of NGOs, academics, grassroots water users organizations and governmental actors; this platform has been able to contribute to the democratization of water governance. This paper analyses the international and national socio-political context in which this platform developed and traces the history and strategies that marked its development. Based on this, it argues that NGOs can play an important role in the development of more democratic and inclusive public policy making in water governance, but that the capacity of NGOs to bring about change greatly depends on the socio-political context and on the networks they are able to forge with grassroots organizations, state agencies, funders and other third sector actors.

The aim of this study is to understand how a new nationwide nonprofit organization, Victim Support Sweden (VSS), emerged in just a few years without public or political demand. In this qualitative study, we reconstruct and follow the first years of the organization. The study is based on a content analysis of VSS’s archival documents from 1988 to 1992 and retrospective interviews with key persons. The results acknowledge the power of entrepreneurs in establishing the organization. The entrepreneurs used their skills, engagement, and backgrounds to “make sense” of the organization, even though there were no crime victims calling for support. They combined logics from adjacent fields and created a specific new “victim support logic.” Thereafter, the logic spread quickly through the entrepreneurs’ lobbying of politicians and education of local victim support volunteers.

Policy makers can use four different modes of governance: ‘hierarchy’, ‘markets’, ‘networks’ and ‘persuasion’. In this article, it is argued that ‘nudging’ represents a distinct (fifth) mode of governance. The effectiveness of nudging as a means of bringing about lasting behaviour change is questioned and it is argued that evidence for its success ignores the facts that many successful nudges are not in fact nudges; that there are instances when nudges backfire; and that there may be ethical concerns associated with nudges. Instead, and in contrast to nudging, behaviour change is more likely to be enduring where it involves social identity change and norm internalisation. The article concludes by urging public policy scholars to engage with the social identity literature on ‘social influence’, and the idea that those promoting lasting behaviour change need to engage with people not as individual cognitive misers, but as members of groups whose norms they internalise and enact.

On the basis of data from the Canton of Zurich for the period from 1880 to 1983 this paper tests three models of political control: the ‘crime control’, ‘conflict’, and ‘economic crises’ models. It is suggested that each of the models might be valid for a particular sub-period. The identification of sub-periods is based on the idea of Kondratiev cycles. For each sub-period the effects of crime rates, the frequency of strikes and of bankruptcies on the number of police personnel and the severity of convictions are estimated by means of ARIMA modeling. The results show different patterns for each sub-period. For the period from 1880 to 1933 growth rates of the indicators of political control are best explained by the frequency of strikes. For the second period there is a strong direct effect of economic crises on the extent of political control.

This article introduces an innovative approach to the role-play teaching technique: one driven by the presence of substance incentives. We analyse the effectiveness of this incentive-driven role-play approach in the engagement of students with International Relations and Security Studies seminars. We assess its usefulness on multiple fronts. We propose that incentive-driven role-play is an effective method of teaching that caters for students’ different learning styles, particularly in theory topics. Its interactive component makes theory tangible for students, allowing them to grasp why certain actions are taken and the consequences of these actions. The use of incentives was found to be important in ensuring motivation, participation and providing easily understandable outcomes that can be transferred to the theory they were studying. This article also highlights the practicalities involved in incentive-driven role-play exercises, noting the importance of clear instructions and precursor lectures on the subject matter.

How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the US's first enduring school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through quantitative analyses of the 1,700 students who attended the school during its first fifty years. The majority were adolescents, with adults also well represented. Prior to 1845, children under age eight were absent. We consider two groups of students who may have made important linguistic contributions to this early signing community: students with deaf relatives and students from Martha's Vineyard. We conclude that adolescents played a crucial role in forming the New England signing community. Young children may have pushed the emergence of ASL, but likely did so at home in deaf families, not at ASD.