This article reports on a research project on local educational politics in France, particularly on relations between the bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions. Three principal conclusions are reached. First, the local bureaucracy does not succeed in insulating itself from the political environment, nor does it seek to do so. Although curriculum decisions remain highly centralized, there has been sufficient administrative deconcentration to make lively local politics possible. Second, Communist control of the primary-school teachers’ union does not restrict communication between union and local bureaucracy. Nor does it prevent the effective representation of individuals and groups. But it does make bureaucracy/union relations more formal than they are in other departments, and it does break down the clear barrier which exists elsewhere between the professional and the bureaucrat, through the creation of a coalition of teachers, parents and sympathetic local politicians. Third, the unions constrain administrative action more effectively at the departmental than at the regional level. This contrast is explained mainly in terms of the different responsibilities of departmental and regional authorities in education.

Budgeting can be understood as a common resource pool problem where spending agencies have incentives to encourage excessive levels of current spending and reduce budget surplus or create budget deficits. The political leadership is assumed to have an important role in keeping fiscal control and resisting the high‐demanders’ pressure for increased spending. Three factors of relevance for their success are investigated: political characteristics (political colour and political strength, the strength of relevant interest groups) and two institutional characteristics– committee structure and budgeting procedures. The analyses are based on panel data from up to 434 Norwegian municipalities in the period from 1991 to 1998. The results support the hypothesis that strong political leadership improves fiscal performance. The effect of interest groups is to a high degree community‐specific. However, an increased share of elderly reduces fiscal surplus. Differences in budgetary procedures do not seem to affect fiscal performance. A strong committee structure seems, on the other hand, to result in better fiscal performance than a weaker one.

This article explores Japanese civil society through voluntary activity in the Save Article 9 movement, a citizen’s activism movement reaching over 7,000 groups in Japan initiated to counter attempts of some government leaders to change or eliminate the current constitution and Article 9–Japan’s renunciation of war and militarism clause. It traces influences on Japan’s so-called “Peace Constitution” as it developed in the postwar period, cyclical challenges to it, and cyclical responses of citizens to preserve and protect it. It discusses an Austrian born woman who grew up in Japan and through circumstances after the war became part of the constitutional drafting committee though neither Japanese nor American at that time. It discusses the emergence of the Save Article 9 movement and activities of those in it. It presents the story of one woman who was a founder of a group, the daughter of a former governor of Osaka Prefecture, whose story reflects her commitment and provides a window on her father as a prisoner in Siberian camps for five years after the war ended, as an advocate for the postwar constitution, and of “social law” as Governor of Osaka Prefecture in the 1970s. It also discusses the similar orientation of the Governors of Tokyo Prefecture and Kyoto Prefecture during that decade. The article discusses how, after halting the threat to Article 9 in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Save Article 9 groups have continued to pursue a holistic vision of peace by being active in post-3.11 environmental debates, and as advocates for better relations between Japan and other Asian countries, notably Korea and China, and for greater inclusion of minorities in Japan, while remaining prepared for a re-emerging challenge to Japan’s peace constitution and its non-militarism clause Article 9.

This article reviews a selected range of comparative political research on women's movements, a subfield of political science whose recent proliferation now positions it at the leading edge of women and politics scholarship. Recognizing that “women” as a category of research is of necessity heterogeneous and informed by differences of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, generation, and religion, the article argues that this complex intersectionality need not mean that women's movements are beyond the scope of comparative political research. Rather, as the research focus of women and politics scholars has become increasingly carefully specified, general patterns are evident in the research that should serve to advance the comparative study of women's movements and comparative political research more generally. The article focuses on definitional challenges and the limitations of conflating “women's movements”, “feminist movements”, and “women in social movements”, and discusses four major research arenas within which cross-national commonalities among women's movements are evidenced. These include the relationship between women's movements and political parties; “double militancy” as a potentially distinctive collective identity problem for women's movement activists; the extent to which political opportunities for women's movements are (or can be) gendered; and the relationship between women's movements and the state. The article concludes with suggestions for future research in the subfields of comparative women's movements and comparative politics.

In this article, we advocate a SPEAKERHOOD STUDIES approach as part of an effort to decenter the ‘native speaker’ in linguistics. Recent critiques of native-speakerhood problematize this construct's links to essentializing discourses born of ethnolinguistic nationalism and colonialism and advocate for more specific and less reductionist approaches to describing speakers in linguistics (e.g. Babel & Grammon 2021, Birkeland et al. 2024, Cheng et al. 2021). We argue that it is important to consider—indeed, to center—conceptions of speakerhood in multilingual, transnational communities that offer a contrast to discourses centered on language purism, nationalism, and standard language ideologies. We examine data from speakers of Quechua, analyzing ways in which their ideologies of speakerhood diverge from naturalized scientific discourses in linguistics, in order to demonstrate the possibilities and the stakes of a speakerhood studies approach.

This article describes a tool that can be used by blind and visually impaired students in phonetics and phonology classrooms: a tactile International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) magnet-board system. This tool consists of IPA magnets and phonological rule symbols that are printed and embossed, so as to be readable by both sighted and visually impaired individuals. A user of the tool can lay out phonetic and phonological data on the magnet board for communicative, organizational, or problem-solving purposes. Since the magnet board can be read both visually and tactually, it can serve as a collaborative space that can be used by both sighted and visually impaired members of the classroom. Potential uses include group work in class and as an augmentation to chalkboard problem-solving demonstrations. The tool can complement already extant options for blind and visually impaired students and facilitate collaboration between sighted and visually impaired students. Here, we describe the tool, exemplify some potential uses, and offer suggestions for further improvement.

This article explores the sources of individual‐level variation in support economic privatization in seven European post‐Soviet countries. It tests economic utilitarian and psychological explanations of variations in support for economic privatization. The economic utilitarian explanation posits that individuals seek to maximize their potential material gains from economic liberalization. The psychological explanation posits that if individuals are generally risk averse, they are not likely to support economic privatization. These hypotheses are then tested using two separate regression models. The first model estimates pooled data from across all seven European post‐Soviet economies. The second model is a pooled analysis that interacts country‐specific dummy variables with each of the independent variables in order to examine the country‐specific effects of the responses. The results show that the economic utilitarian and psychological explanations are both strong predictors of why some support and others oppose privatization in the seven European post‐Soviet countries.

This paper investigates the relationship between the emergence of social enterprises (SEs) and the historical development of the Italian welfare state. Our research offers a comprehensive overview of the internal and external influences that shaped the constitutive relations between the welfare state and SEs. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups has been adopted. This study suggests that two interconnected dynamics—the emergence of new social needs being answered by private organisations and the increased prominence of third sector actors during the privatisation of the welfare state—shaped the co-evolution of the welfare state and SEs in Italy. The study also suggests that the emergence and evolution of Social Enterprises in the years leading up to 2001 was mainly a bottom-up phenomena stemming from the actions of citizens setting up private organisations (often cooperatives) to answer to social problems created by new social needs and the structural reform of the welfare state. After 2001 especially with the new law on SEs in 2016, the evolution of SEs seems to have been increasingly influenced by the surrounding ecosystem of actors and supranational policy discourses rather than SEs themselves.

As a result in part of the way non-profit institutions are defined and treated in the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), little is known about the size, scope, financial base and role of this set of institutions at the international level, even though their importance is increasingly being recognised throughout the world. To remedy this significant lack of systematic information on non-profit institutions cross-nationally, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has undertaken a major analysis of the economic role of this sector in twelve countries throughout the world, utilising a more meaningful definition of the sector and an approach that is otherwise consistent with the overall thrust of the SNA system. This paper outlines the basis of the more inclusive definition of the non-profit sector embodied in this project, the classification system formulated to structure data-gathering on this more broadly-defined sector and the data assembly strategy developed to build up key estimates of the scale, structure and revenue sources of the non-profit sector in the project countries. The article concludes with a recommendation to incorporate a similar approach to the assembly of data on the non-profit sector into the ongoing SNA system on a regular basis.

The recruitment and retention of voluntary referees is challenging for nonprofit sport organizations. This study examines the trickle-down effect of role models on the retention of already active referees and the recruitment of new referees in German football (soccer). Secondary panel data on the number of referees and role models (i.e., referees promoted to the status of a Bundesliga or FIFA referee) were collected for the 21 regional football associations. The regression results show that the presence of role models has a statistically significant and positive effect on the number of existing referees. The number of new referees is positively affected by referees who were promoted to the status of a first Bundesliga referee, but not by those promoted to the status of a FIFA referee. The findings suggest that nonprofit sport organizations should capitalize on the effect of role models to a greater extent.

Expert surveys have been used to measure a wide variety of phenomena in political science, ranging from party positions, to corruption, to the quality of democracy and elections. However, expert judgments raise important validity concerns, both about the object being measured as well as the experts. It is argued in this article that the context of evaluation is also important to consider when assessing the validity of expert surveys. This is even more important for expert surveys with a comprehensive, worldwide scope, such as democracy or corruption indices. This article tests the validity of expert judgments about election integrity – a topic of increasing concern to both the international community and academics. Evaluating expert judgments of election integrity provides an important contribution to the literature evaluating the validity of expert surveys as instruments of measurement as: (1) the object under study is particularly complex to define and multifaceted; and (2) election integrity is measured in widely varying institutional contexts, ranging from electoral autocracies to liberal democracies. Three potential sources of bias are analysed (the object, the experts and the context), using a unique new dataset on election integrity entitled the ‘Perceptions of Electoral Integrity’ dataset. The data include over 800 experts in 66 parliamentary and presidential elections worldwide. It is found that validity of expert judgments about election integrity is increased if experts are asked to provide factual information (rather than evaluative judgments), and if they are asked to evaluate election day (rather than pre‐election) integrity. It is also found that ideologically polarised elections and elections of lower integrity increase expert disagreement about election integrity. The article concludes with suggestions for researchers using the expert survey data on election integrity on how to check the validity of their data and adjust their analyses accordingly, and outlines some remaining challenges for future data collection using expert surveys.

The rise of citizens’ initiatives is changing the relation between governments and citizens. This paper contributes to the discussion of how governments can productively relate to these self-organizing citizens. The study analyzes the relation between the social production of invited spaces and the invitational character of such spaces, as perceived by governments and citizens. Invited spaces are the (institutional, legal, organizational, political and policy) spaces that are created by governments for citizens to take on initiatives to create public value. We characterize four types of invited spaces and compare four cases in Dutch planning to analyze how these types of invited spaces are perceived as invitational. From the analysis, we draw specific lessons for governments that want to stimulate citizens’ initiatives. We conclude with a general insight for public administration scholars; in addition to formal rules and structures, scholars should pay more attention to interactions, attitudes and meaning making of both government officials and citizens.

As a consequence of the Eurozone crisis and the creation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the prospect of a transfer union has become a particularly contested aspect of European integration. How should one understand the public backlash against fiscal transfers? And, what explains voter preferences for international transfers more generally? Using data from the 2014 European Elections Study (EES), this article describes the first cross‐national analysis of voters’ preferences on international transfers. The analysis reveals a strong association between voters’ non‐economic cultural orientations (i.e., their cosmopolitanism) and their position on transfers. At the same time, it is found that voters’ economic left‐right orientations are crucial for a fuller understanding of the public conflict over transfers. This counters previous research that finds economic left‐right orientations to be of little explanatory value. This study demonstrates that the association between economic left‐right orientations and preferences for international transfers is conditional on a person's social class. Among citizens in a high‐income class an economically left‐leaning position is associated with support for transfers, whereas it is associated with opposition to transfers among citizens in a low‐income class.

The members of the European Parliament are elected in nationally organized and domestically oriented polls; however, in the Strasbourg Assembly they form transnational Party Groups or Europarties. The Rules of Procedure require such formations for the functioning of the Assembly, but Party Groups are much more than procedure requisites. They assemble elected representatives of national parties which share a consistent similarity in political ideologies and strategies. Party integration is a decisive development in the unification process of the Western European countries and it is expected to come from the Party Groups experience. The paper analyses such an issue by examining roll-call votes. Data include a systematic sample of votes cast during the first and second elected Parliament. The research looks into two fundamental items: (a) Party Group cohesion (an index of agreement is used to measure it); (b) voting line-ups of Party Groups. The aim is to point out the most important political cleavages and issues of the Community political system.

Health care governance constitutes the central domestic problem in the US from both a socio-political and an economic viewpoint. Compared with other post-industrial countries, it is inefficient, ineffective and characterised by an inequitable ‘particularism’ in dealing with different classes of citizens. Utilising the cultural theory of American exceptionalism, this article discusses why there is no compulsory universal insurance in the US, by reconstructing the structural developments of the health care system during the last century, and documenting the anti-social medicine ideological positions of the providers. The idea of a balanced combination of rugged individualism and reformist liberalism producing satisfactory collective outcomes does not appear to work in this case. There is a severe imbalance between the interests of the providers and those of a fragmented and stratified public thus far incapable of acting cooperatively in the pursuit of better collective outcomes. President Obama's proposal for a clearly defined and potentially satisfactory collective outcome is confronted by formidable resistance from the vast constellation of providers which will not be easy to dismantle.