As participatory governance approaches to local development get adopted also in transition countries, one of the key questions is how participation actually impacts local governance outcomes. This study examines the link between non-electoral participation and different public goods outcomes in rural Ukraine along with identifying the role of community-based organizations (CBOs). Using a unique survey data from Ukraine, I approach these questions empirically explicitly distinguishing between different public goods outcomes. I find that participation appears to be positively associated with local school and water supply outcomes. In addition, CBOs are found to be associated with better quality of water supply systems motivating a discussion about establishment of service cooperatives for water supply as a functional local governance arrangement.

The international debate of the shifting bases of philanthropy suggested by modernization theory has been ongoing since the beginning of the twenty-first century, yet empirical evidence remains lacking from the perspective of philanthropic motivation. The society and philanthropy of China have undergone tremendous transformation since the launch of Reform and Opening Up in 1978, providing an ideal context for testing the assumption of the shifting bases of philanthropy. Through investigating the motivation structure of collectivism and individualism behind individual giving in contemporary China, this study rejects the assumption drawing on the data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). This study helps deepen the understanding of culture’s roles during modernization. It also has important implications for how charitable giving can be effectively promoted both inside and outside of the context of China.

T.R. Gurr's article, which appeared in the December 1974, issue of the American Political Science Review, reported several important findings from analysis of the authority characteristics of 336 polities that functioned between 1800 and 1971. While other methodological points are addressed throughout, this study is primarily a comparison of the findings of Gurr's analysis with those of two reanalyses based upon less-inclusive conceptual and operational definitions of what constitutes system-transforming change. Among other departures from Gurr's findings is substantially less consistent support for the hypothesis that polity durability is enhanced by coherence among authority traits. Analysis of a dynamic version of Eckstein's consonance theory reveals that incoherent historical polities which adapted in any direction were more long-living than their non-changing counterparts, and equally long-living as polities with coherent authority patterns. Thus, the study revealed not only that some of Gurr's findings were dependent upon his operationalization of “end of polity”, but also the need for further examination of the data in light of discrepant findings among the three analyses.

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

The scope, complexity, and interconnectedness of modern society should prompt us to develop dynamic understandings of democratic modes of inclusion and exclusion. In particular, democratic theory is becoming more attentive to the mismatch between those who make decisions and those who are affected by them as well as to the need to account for the voice of the latter. In this article I build on James Bohman’s understanding of democracy as a rule by multiple dêmoi to develop a framework for studying and evaluating modes of democratic inclusion that are based on being affected. To develop this framework I turn to law and public administration and examine the democratic properties of different institutions and procedures that give a voice to those who are affected by a decision.

Although political efficacy is a key concept in theories of political participation and democratic governance, different studies have conceptualised and operationalised efficacy in different ways. Using comparable survey data from the United States, West Germany, Great Britain and Australia, this study builds upon previous research in an attempt to clarify our understanding of the dimensions of political efficacy and their relationship to socio-demographic factors. The results suggest that ‘internal efficacy’ and ‘external efficacy’ are distinct attitudinal dimensions which are comparable in all four nations, and that each is related to certain socio-demographic characteristics.

Questions about aid reduction and its implications are crucial to understanding the future of civil society in many low- and middle-income countries and in post-conflict states. Local civil society in these contexts is often heavily influenced by foreign donors. This article provides an introduction to this theme issue about aid reduction and local civil society. The objective of the introduction and issue articles is to examine the causes of aid reduction and donor withdrawal, the impacts on local civil society organizations (CSOs), and any resulting change in local civil society. We ask: What are the global trends in aid reduction? What impacts does aid reduction have on local CSOs? How do local CSOs respond and adapt? The contributions in this issue demonstrate that aid reduction is indeed global in scale and that impacts and adaptations are often strikingly similar across countries and regions. These similarities form the basis for building new theory but also prompt new questions about the global effects of aid on civil society.

What happens at convenings held by community-based civil society organizations and how do they influence organizational outcomes? Although ethnographies provide details about organizations’ internal dynamics, they offer limited insights into the distribution of those dynamics and their impact on outcomes. This article describes systematic social observation and explains how we adapted this method to CSOs for collecting data on multiple convenings from several organizations. To demonstrate the method’s viability, we digitized our SSO tool and used it in a pilot study of three CSOs in Indianapolis to collect observational data from 99 convenings. We illustrate the value of SSO for studying CSOs by presenting distributions of interaction styles and cross-demographic interaction across organizations. We note how such data could be combined with survey and administrative data to analyze the impact of CSOs internal dynamics on organizational outcomes. We conclude by discussing the broader utility and limitations of the SSO method for research on CSOs and the third sector.

Opposing the increasing importance of quantitative data in society is the observation that many students in the social sciences have a fear of quantitative methods. To ensure math-averse students acquire the necessary quantitative skills, we propose a curriculum-based approach whereby a Learning Trajectory of Quantitative Methods (LTQM) is integrated in the non-methodological courses of the programme. A structured integration of such methods can ensure repeated exposure to applications of such methods in a context of their interests. Moreover, the use of a learning trajectory enables students to encounter ‘learning activities’ with gradual increasing complexity providing stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks. This article describes the LTQM and discusses both lecturer and student experiences with the proposed innovation thereby providing an in-depth assessment of the benefits and challenges with the integration of a curriculum-wide learning trajectory.

The debate on the ‘perils of presidentialism’ has been raging for over 30 years and gone through at least three waves. It began with the influential work of Juan Linz and most recently has seen the emergence of a rich literature on coalitional presidentialism, which has demonstrated the capacity of presidents to manage fragmented multi-party legislatures, and hence overcome the dangers of political deadlock. Jean Blondel’s last book (African Presidential Republics, Oxford, Routledge, 2019) belongs to this latest wave in the sense that he argues that presidential systems can overcome their limitations, and that certain aspects of the presidential models actually give them an advantage over parliamentary equivalents. This article reviews Blondel’s argument against the latest developments in African politics. I suggest that there are fewer instances of positive presidentialism today than Blondel hoped for, in part because democratic progress has often proved to be particularly vulnerable to later autocratization due to a tendency not to entrench gains via constitutional reforms. Despite this cautionary note, however, I conclude that Blondel is right to reject the idea that African cases provide support for the ‘perils of presidentialism’. This is not only because Blondel highlights a number of presidents who played a benign or positive role in their country’s political development, but also because the coalitional presidentialism literature suggests that there is little evidence that parliamentary systems would perform significantly better.

While some studies have revealed that social capital is shaped within civil society, the role of political institutions in forming social capital has not yet been clearly shown. This article, therefore, tries to evaluate the politico‐institutional foundations of social capital measured in terms of associational life in Switzerland. The purpose is to apply Putnam's method of comparing subsystems to the Swiss cantons. The empirical analyses show that government structures are strongly associated with social capital. More specifically, the availability of direct democracy promotes a lively associational life. In addition, consensus democracy and decentralized political structures contribute to social capital. In this vein, the access points of the politico‐institutional structure constitute a feasible ‘top‐down’ path to breaking out of the vicious circle of distrust, disengagement and weak democracy.

This paper examines how far a post-event volunteering legacy is facilitated by event organising committees leveraging existing volunteering infrastructure in host communities. The paper uses the lens of regulatory capitalism to examine how the organising committees of the Sydney 2000 and London 2012 Olympic Games engaged with the third sector, and specifically the volunteering infrastructure of the host nations, in the planning, delivery and post-event phases to create a volunteering legacy for the host community. The two case studies involved 27 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders representing the organising committees and the volunteering infrastructure in the host cities. While the Sydney Olympics had no specific remit for legacy planning, the third sector led legacy efforts in Australia. At the London Olympics, there was a failure to engage with the third sector, which limited government-led legacy planning and implementation. In the latter case, the framework of regulatory capitalism prioritised contracts with the private sector over meaningful engagement with the third sector.

Teaching and learning in college and university classrooms has received increased attention in recent years, including in political science. While historically, political science college education was dominated by the model of lectures and perhaps discussions in brick-and-mortar classrooms, the last two decades have witnessed changes in instructional techniques and considerable variation in pedagogical approaches across instructors and classes. At the same time, we sometimes lack the empirical evidence that these innovative approaches are effective and result in improved learning outcomes. We suggest that sharing our innovative pedagogical approaches becomes even more valuable to the academic community when we add an empirical evaluation of their effectiveness on students’ success and learning.

Literature in the field of employability and the third sector has focused upon the impact of marketisation on third sector providers, elaborating how commissioning processes have led to a contraction of (smaller) third sector organisations (TSOs) and an expansion of larger private sector bodies. Extant research does not however explore the role of third sector organisations in the employability of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Therefore, our paper explores this gap by adopting a qualitative approach via a total of 36 interviews involving migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and managers of third sector organisations, alongside a categorisation of TSOs. Our findings reveal that TSOs are the primary (and for asylum seekers perhaps the only) providers of integration support services and training or education services. We found that only a limited number of organisations provide formal employability services or skills development services which seem to be only residual in terms of the range of activities that TSOs can organise. Thus, perhaps the main function that TSOs perform that enables integration into the UK labour market is providing a safe and trusted environment that people can use to increase their confidence, improve their well-being, broaden their social circle, learn the language or increase their work experience.

Two theoretical traditions in the study of European voter alignments emphasize alternatively class and territorial structuring of mass politics. Until the 1970′s the developmental paradigm resting on the class-based, stable polity model of the 1945–1970 period ruled the research agenda. The weakening of party alignments in the 1970′s and the introduction of the competing territorial paradigm challenged the dominant model. This research tests both models in Britain against the supposed stability of the 1945–1970 period. The results demonstrate that while the developmental model fits Britain as a whole quite well, the introduction of regional polity analysis exposes considerable instability of voter and party alignments, uneven class development and the mobilization of cultural cleavages, dynamics which undergird the politics of cultural defence and find expression in the nationalist parties in the 1970′s. In questioning the assumed stability of the 1945–1970 period the findings challenge the foundations of the current debates on realignment in Britain.