In recent years linguists have gained new insight into human language capacities on the basis of results from linguistics and biology. The so-called biolinguistic enterprise aims to fill in the explanatory gap between language and biology, on both theoretical and experimental grounds, hoping to reach a deeper understanding of language as a phenomenon rooted in biology. This research program is taking its first steps, and it has already given rise to new insights on the human language capacity, as well as to controversies, echoing debates that go back to the earlier days of generative grammar. The present discussion piece provides a high-level characterization of biolinguistics. It highlights the main articulation of this research program and points to recent studies linking language and biology. It also compares the biolinguistic program, as defined in Chomsky 2005 and Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011, to the view of the human language faculty presented in Jackendoff 2002 and Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, and to the discussion in Jackendoff 2011.

The European debt crisis has uncovered serious tension between democratic politics and market pressure in contemporary democracies. This tension arises when governments implement unpopular fiscal consolidation packages in order to raise their macroeconomic credibility among financial investors. Nonetheless, the dominant view in current research is that governments should not find it difficult to balance demands from voters and investors because the economic and political costs of fiscal consolidations are low. This would leave governments with sufficient room to promote fiscal consolidation according to their ideological agenda. This article re‐examines this proposition by studying how the risk of governments to be replaced in office affects the probability and timing of fiscal consolidation policies. The results show that governments associate significant electoral risk with consolidations because electorally vulnerable governments strategically avoid consolidations towards the end of the legislative term in order to minimise electoral punishment. Specifically, the predicted probability of consolidation decreases from 40 per cent after an election to 13 per cent towards the end of the term when the government's margin of victory is small. When the electoral margin is large, the probability of consolidation is roughly stable at around 35 per cent. Electoral concerns are the most important political determinant of consolidations, leaving only a minor role for ideological concerns. Governments, hence, find it more difficult to reconcile political and economic pressures on fiscal policy than previous, influential research implies. The results suggest that existing studies under‐estimate the electoral risk associated with consolidations because they ignore the strategic behaviour that is established in this analysis.

In this article social movement theory is used to assess the strategic repertoire of a relatively new sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating for migrants rights in Ireland. Pro-migrant NGOs are majority community-led and face a challenging political and societal context for mobilization including a restrictive immigration regime, political and media discourse that racializes migrants, weak public support for the expansion of migrants’ rights, and high rates of discrimination and social exclusion experienced by migrant communities. A competitive funding environment also inhibits pro-migrant NGOs capacity to work with emerging migrant-led organizations that simultaneously compete for state and foundation funds. Pro-migrant NGOs in Ireland have responded with a three levelled strategy, namely alliance building with sympathetic public officials and service and information provision to state bodies, campaigns contesting negative media and societal framing of migrants, and networking with transnational NGO coalitions working on immigration issues.

This article examines Albert Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty hypothesis within a supranational context. It makes use of an original 2012 data set drawn from ‘The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-border Practices and Transnational Identities among EU and Third Country Citizens’ (EUCROSS) project, which was conducted across six European Union (EU) democracies. The article finds that supranational loyalty to an entity other than one’s own nation state enhances citizen participation in national elections, while greater transnational mobility has no significant impact on national voter turnout. These findings have two important implications. First, supranational loyalties do not always discourage individuals from honouring their national political commitments. Second, member state nationals who are loyal to the EU may not show up at the supranational ballot box if national institutions are perceived to be more powerful to influence decision-making in Brussels.

This article maps the state of political science since the turn of the millennium. It begins by reviewing the influential description of the discipline in Robert Goodin’s (2011 [2009]) introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Science. It then introduces an alternative approach, based on citation indexes, to generate a comparative list of influential authors for the same time period. After comparing Goodin’s list with our own, we use the same method to generate a list of the most influential books and articles of the 2009–2018 period and describe how the discipline has changed over the intervening decade. Two of the more interesting findings include the continued importance of books (in addition to articles) in political science citations and an apparent trend towards increased pluralism in recent years.

Informed by self-determination theory (SDT), this study explores older adults’ long-term community volunteering experiences and motivations in Shanghai. We took a qualitative research approach to conduct face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with older adults who were long-term volunteers in Shanghai communities (N = 69). We performed thematic analysis and generated themes for their experiences and evolving motivations. Participants began volunteering because it was enjoyable and helped them adapt to life after retirement. As their volunteering progressed, participants’ motivations gradually evolved and they developed a fusion motivation––juewu, combining characteristics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations––for their strong commitment to volunteering. Gradually, participants assimilated juewu into their volunteer identity, which encouraged them to lead community self-governance initiatives. This study sheds light on the evolving, nuanced, underlying motivational process that shapes older adults’ experiences of long-term community volunteering.

With data from the 2006 Japanese General Social Survey, this study examines factors associated with citizen participation in international development aid (IDA). In line with the literature on correlates of charitable giving of time and money, it finds that structural positions of individuals, measured by their demographic, socioeconomic and social network characteristics, are associated with the probability of citizen participation in IDA. Moreover, the study shows that variables such as English skills, measured by the ability and opportunity to use English, and the level of endorsement of Official Development Assistance projects significantly and positively predict IDA participation status. Implications of these findings are discussed for future research on charitable giving for international development in Japan and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere.

In this article simulation results are used to analyze the capacity of a general politico-economic model, developed by one of the authors, to generate cycles of various lengths. The model describes behaviour of individuals and organizations in the economic as well as the political sphere. The interaction between both spheres gives rise to short term (business) cycles as well as long term (Kondratieff) cycles. The analyses concentrate on the effect variations in the political sector (regarding, e.g., party identification on non-economic grounds, the sensitivity of voters, and the discount parameter for past economic results) have on the cycles found.

As a reaction to the COVID- 19 pandemic and the wave of global social justice protests in 2020, Generation Z (born 1997–2012)0 F feels an intensified obligation to get involved in politics, resulting in unprecedented youth activism. Gen Z is more politically active than previous generations of youth, partly due to this generation’s emergence as “digital natives.” An underlying theme motivating Gen Z activism is their affinity for addressing social justice issues through civic engagement. But do politically active young people concerned with social justice self-identify as being members of political parties? Or is their activism occurring predominantly online and in the streets? This article conducts an exploratory analysis to investigate whether youth bridge their social consciousness and activism with deliberative democracy, notably by joining political parties. By looking at youth activism and party membership across 46 countries, I find that political activism online exhibits some connection to party membership among young people. Understanding the connection between young people’s “chosen” forms of participation and formal institutions can provide insights into how online activism can break down barriers between youth and political institutions.

This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studying the distribution of acoustic cues (duration, intensity, F0) in controlled data. The results show that initial syllables in Georgian words are marked by greater duration than all subsequent syllables, regardless of syllable count and phrasal context. After excluding domain-initial strengthening as an alternative explanation, this finding provides evidence in favor of fixed initial stress. Likewise, initial syllables are marked by greatest intensity, but the consistent gradual drop in intensity throughout the word suggests that this effect may not be stress-related. The F0 results align with the existing accounts: individual lexical words form accentual phrases marked by a low pitch accent on the initial syllable and a high final boundary tone on the final syllable. Additionally, new evidence for a phrasal accent, aligned with the penult, is presented. F0 targets are shown to be completely absent in the context of post-focal deaccenting, which shows that F0-marking in Georgian is reserved for phrasal prosody and is not intrinsic to stress-marking. These results help account for the facts related to word stress, phrasal intonation, and their interplay in Georgian, the object of debate in the literature.

This essay reflects the personal experiences and views of someone who has passed through the first stages of a university career in Germany. A few months ago, a new federal university framework law was passed which will change the system profoundly. The present generation of postdoctoral researchers, however, are the products of the old system, which will continue in force until the new one is fully implemented. In what follows, I describe both systems from a young scholar's point of view. While the old system suffered from serious defects, with adverse consequences for young academics in particular, the new order is likely to be even worse.

This article proposes that the possible word orders for any natural language construction composed of n elements, each of which selects for the category headed by the next, are universally limited both across and within languages to a subclass of permutations on the ‘universal order of command’ 1, …, n, as determined by their selectional restrictions. The permitted subclass is known as the ‘separable’ permutations, and grows in n as the large Schröder series {1, 2, 6, 22, 90, 394, 1806, … }. This universal is identified as formal because it follows directly from the assumptions of COMBINATORY CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR (CCG)—in particular, from the fact that all CCG syntactic rules are subject to a combinatory projection principle that limits them to binary rules applying to contiguous nonempty categories.

The article presents quantitative empirical evidence in support of this claim from the linguistically attested orders of the four elements Dem(onstrative), Num(erator), A(djective), N(oun), which have been examined in connection with various versions of Greenberg's putative 20th universal concerning their order. A universal restriction to separable permutation is also supported by word-order variation in the Germanic verb cluster and in the Hungarian verb complex, among other constructions.

In 1993, Robert Putnam published his path-breaking study on government efficiency in contemporary Italy. Looking for reasons why Northern Italy outperformed its Southern counterpart on every single indicator of government efficiency, Putnam found only one convincing culprit: Southern Italy's much lower stock of social capital - networks and voluntary associations, social trust and norms of reciprocity. Two years later, in 1995, Putnam used his Italian insights to predict the future of American democracy: shrinking stocks of social capital would progressively undermine both the efficiency and the quality of democratic governance in the United States.

From that moment onwards, the issue of social capital became one of the most lively debated and contested topics of political science on both sides of the Atlantic. Putnam's thesis was provocative and far reaching enough to prompt large numbers of researchers to test the validity of the social capital thesis for their own countries, to examine the validity of its underlying assumptions and to search for empirical substantiation of its major hypotheses.

The case of the French textile and clothing industry during the post-1974 crisis period illustrates a number of issues relevant to the debate about meso-corporatism and interest intermediation at the sectoral level in industry. It highlights the importance of attempts to understand the relationships between organised interests and the state in the analysis of the policy process. The pattern of state-industry relations which evolved was crucial in determining the outcome of conflict between state and industry over the management of restructuring during the crisis.

The inapplicability of the meso-corporatist model to this case becomes clear. There was a conspicuous absence of either political exchange or a shared policy agenda, each an important element of corporatist patterns of policy formation, in both the formation and implementation of adjustment policies in the sector. Mutual suspicion and a struggle to control the terms of the debate yielded a low level of co-operation. Eventually the industry was able to appropriate increased public funds on its own terms and to insist on a protective trade regime.

The complexity of the case points to the need to broaden the debate over models of interest intermediation and to relate it to issues in political economy. This is particularly important with regard to the structure of the bureaucratic state and notions of state autonomy.