This article links party organisation to party performance, examining their relationship over almost half a century in an in-depth case study of the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). It proceeds from the assumption that party organisation does matter for party performance, at least indirectly, and that the adaptation of the party organisation to a changing environment is, in the long run, the only viable strategy for party goal achievement. While the ÖVP's environment was subject to important changes, all of which worked against the party, it has failed to adapt to them. This, in turn, has reduced the competitiveness of the ÖVP. Consequently its record in achieving most of its party goals has been rather poor since 1970. The reconstruction of the intra-party discussions reveals that the party leadership had access to analyses identifying the structural weaknesses of the party organisation since the late 1950s. The ÖVP's failure to adapt is explained by using the ‘nested games’ approach of Tsebelis (1990). In order to enhance the understanding of organisational dynamics of parties in a more general sense, the case of the ÖVP is related to the work of Panebianco (1988) and Janda (1990).

A number of important books, by both German and Anglo-Saxon authors, have been published recently which have concerned themselves with aspects of West Germany’s political culture. These include, in particular: Germany Transformed (Baker et al., 1981); a revised edition of Edinger’s study of the politics of the Federal Republic, Politics in West Germany (Edinger, 1977); a commentary on aspects of West German political culture, accompanied by a wide variety of tables (Greiffenhagen and Greiffenhagen, 1979); a dictionary of political culture terms as applied to the Federal Republic (Greiffenhagen et al., 1981); two collections of essays by British, American and West German authors (Paterson andsmith, 1981; Dring and Smith, 1982); and a set of essays by political scientists and party spokesmen from the Federal Republic concerning the relationship between the citizen and the parties (Raschke, 1982).

This article departs from the observation of a widely heralded shift in the governance of welfare, which is claimed to represent a more complex and uncertain institutional environment for third sector organizations (TSOs). It has been argued that hybrid organizations carry innovative potential compared to traditional nonprofits in terms of more effectively or creatively dealing with contradictory pressures from multiple institutional logics. Using a recently developed theory to study nonprofit hybrids, this paper explores the concrete organizational practice of ‘managing hybridity.’ A qualitative study of institutional logics and participant interactions in a purposively sampled ‘post-corporatist’ hybrid TSO in Belgium was conducted. Our analysis first revealed that at the organization-level, our case represented a blended nonprofit hybrid. The particular combination of competing logics, however, put complex demands on staff members, who used three types of coping strategies in their everyday routines. A managerial and service logic prevailed, at the expense of the TSO's participatory and emancipatory mission. Implications of the findings for nascent theorizing on nonprofit hybrids are discussed.

Fundamental reforms of the Austrian university system in recent years represent a radical break with the past, a change of paradigm in the guiding principles and workings of the university and its relationship with its environment. I call this the ‘managerial and entrepreneurial turn’ in Austrian higher education. Nevertheless, these changes did not occur abruptly but in connection with long-term socio-economic trends, international developments and shifts in the ideologies of key actors with in and outside the university system. In the most recent period, a key external influence - the European Bologna process - has played a critical role in shaping reforms.

Jean Blondel’s academic impact in the field of comparative governments was enormous, but difficult to measure. Over the past 60 years, his publications have fuelled the work of several generations of colleagues around the world. In this short essay, we first introduce his most influential publications. Second, we introduce the empirical findings of major comparative studies which stand ‘on the shoulders’ of his research on governments and ministers in parliamentary democracies. Overall, we state that Jean Blondel’s comparative research was not designed to leave behind an enduring theory of his own. Instead, he was more interested in looking for more unexpected measurable facts and merge them into generalizations about the future of cabinet governments and political leaders.

This article focuses on the growth and change that the Norwegian non-governmental international aid field has undergone since the Second World War. Questions are raised on the relationships and borders between the organisations involved and the government. What are the reasons for the apparent closeness of government to non-govemmental organisations? A short theoretical discussion is followed by an empirical description of the Norwegian (and Scandinavian) non-govemmental landscape’. This description is followed by a discussion of government policy towards these organisations in Norway (and also, to a certain extent, the other Scandinavian countries), and in conclusion some questions are raised on their future role.

In dementia in inflecting and agglutinating languages, morphosyntax is much better preserved than lexical access or pragmatics, but little is known about how dementia affects language in polysynthetic agglutinating languages with their complex verb morphology. Fortuitously, a series of narratives by a skilled Arapaho storyteller includes sessions from late in his life, when he was evidently dementing. Verb forms and clausal connectors in the speaker's Arapaho predementia and dementia narratives were sorted computationally and analyzed statistically. We found a decline in subordination and an increase in utterances missing verbs. There was a shift from using transitive active verb forms toward impersonal and passive verb forms, which require less pragmatic and syntactic computation to deploy, and a shift in subordination markers away from those requiring explicit consideration of the temporal relations between clauses.

In recent years, social entrepreneurs in the third sector have played an increasingly important role in addressing societal problems. Despite their growing presence in civic society, little is known about how social entrepreneurs obtain the necessary skills, knowledge, and motivation to take on this role. This exploratory study empirically addresses this gap through 27 in-depth case studies of social entrepreneurial leaders of third-sector initiatives in Brazil. Findings show that the social entrepreneurs relied on a convergence of experiences including: direct experience with inequality, interaction with target populations, volunteer work, religious institutions, social activism, formal education, professional experience, reading, and intercultural interactions. The study also presents a nuanced understanding of how the interplay among life experiences and learning processes informed these third-sector leaders. Results are relevant to scholars and practitioners committed to fostering social entrepreneurship in the third sector.

Volunteering in civil society organizations (CSOs) is sometimes idealized as welcoming arena for everybody. Prior research, however, has shown that participation in volunteer work depends on gender, wealth, education, and social networks, suggesting that CSOs are not in fact open to everyone. Inequality within different fields of volunteering combined with the factors that put actors into more powerful positions has rarely been scrutinized. Besides identifying the characteristics and resources relevant for promotion, we primarily investigate how these patterns differ between four subfields: politics, social services, religion, and sports. We analyzed a large database created from the Austrian micro-census. The findings reveal significant relations between the actors’ gender, their occupational and educational status, and their hierarchical positions in CSOs within each of the subfields. Our results indicate that the extent to which social inequality spills over to volunteering depends on field characteristics: In the fields of sports and politics, occupational status plays a major role, while in the fields of religion and social services, educational status is more important. We explain these differences through organizational and individual factors that characterize these social fields.

Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.

This brief article introduces the Special Issue “Unlikely Partners? Evolving Government-Nonprofit Relationships, East and West”, which calls attention to a growing pattern of “nonprofitization” of the welfare state in countries stretching from Western Europe, through Central Europe and Russia, and into Central Asia and the Far East to determine what lessons they might hold for the Russian experience and for the evolution of the modern welfare state more generally.

At first sight, the electoral systems in Denmark, Germany, South Africa and Sweden may seem different and an attempt to categorize them together odd. All four, however, belong to the same category, which Arend Lijphart calls ‘proportional representation two-tier districting systems’, and the effects of these systems on the proportionality of the representation of political parties are, indeed, comparable. The four electoral systems were the basis of their countries’ general elections during 1994. The results of these elections are used for analyses and discussions of the relative importance of the differences which one also finds between them. The paper ends with an examination of the behavioural consequences of these institutional arrangements, which are also found elsewhere, i.e. in Estonia, Iceland, Norway and New Zealand (in the new electoral system currently being implemented there).

This article offers a new empirical perspective on the state of Comparative Politics (CP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We present findings on the authors, methods, and epistemology of CP publications in the most relevant journals from eleven countries in the region. The major finding is that CP is rather marginal in CEE Political Science. Furthermore, CP articles predominantly focus on the authors’ country of origin, use off-the-shelf data, apply mostly qualitative data analysis techniques, and rarely take a historical perspective.

Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesized link between cognition and cross-category harmony. As with the typological tendency itself, we find mixed evidence for harmony across different types of phrases. Specifically, learners are biased in favor of consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adposition in the adpositional phrase. However, the bias for consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adjective in the noun phrase depends on the semantic similarity between adjectives and verbs. When adjectives are active and therefore more verb-like (e.g. broken), we find harmony; when they are stative and therefore less verb-like (e.g. blue), we do not. These results suggest that the bias for cross-category harmony is not purely based on the syntactic notions of head and dependent, but reflects the interaction between a general cognitive bias favoring consistent order and cross-category similarity.