Men’s Sheds are unique community-based mutual-aid not-for-profit membership organisations, which aim to use activities such as craftwork to improve men’s health. While the Men’s Sheds movement appears to be growing, with Sheds in Africa, Europe, Oceania and North America, there is limited understanding of what makes a thriving Shed or membership association more widely. This paper uses in-depth qualitative interviews with committee members of Men’s Sheds in Western Australia to uncover what makes a thriving Shed. The findings reveal that the key factors relate to having an inclusive governance, an inclusive space for activities, supportive networks, and sufficient resources. Overall, a thriving shed is one where members feel included. The paper proposes a framework for a thriving Men’s Shed and offers insights for other membership associations.

It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ‘rest’. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy.

The abolition of dual administration of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China is an inexorable and essential trend toward a genuine civil society. This article seeks to examine the challenges that come with the abolition of the dual administration and to explore how to address them during this transitional period. It considers the state dominated NGO governance in China and its transformation since the 1990s and argues that the decisive role the government plays in NGOs’ development, which is criticized by many scholars, is the outcome of Chinese history, political culture and the needs of NGOs. It gives account of the challenges for NGO governance and development following the abolition of dual administration. Suggestions for new approaches to NGO development are discussed from the perspectives of a value-based partnership between NGOs and the government, the importance of securing public trust, the development of legal systems and finally, the role of NGO network organizations.

In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, however, relied on class and education as proxies for these processes. In contrast, this study provides a direct test of the influence of the globalisation processes on attitudes to economic distribution, the European Union and immigration as well as on vote choice across nine West European countries. The results show that variables tapping the core aspects of globalisation have relatively little impact on attitudes and vote choice; are largely unable to account for the effects of class and education; and do not seem to lead to the establishment of new divisions between winners and losers within or across classes. Rather, the winners and losers of globalisation seem to be the traditional winners and losers with respect to material positions and political influence in modern Western societies – that is, those placed higher as opposed to lower in the class and education hierarchies. In this way, the proposed cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation may seem to be rather much like old wine in new bottles.

Nonprofits have unique strategic concerns, including their dependence on external resources, the management of multiple stakeholders, perceptions about their organizational legitimacy as well as their primary focus on the social value of their organizational mission (Stone and Brush 1996). For shared Jewish–Arab organizations in Israel that are seeking to promote a ‘shared society,’ the obstacles in navigating these various challenges are particularly pronounced and require a very unique kind of adaptive capacity (see Letts et al. 1999; Connolly and York 2003; Strichman et al. 2007). Often operating outside of the general consensus, these organizations are faced with the significant challenge of promoting values of partnership, equality and mutual interests among two populations that are often at odds. This research seeks to shed light on how shared Arab–Jewish nonprofits are continually working to strengthen organizational capacities to more effectively carry out their particular organizational mission, given the myriad of challenges they face.

Methods of quantifying distance between sound sequences are known as phonological distance measures. Despite the wide application across subfields, phonological distance has been calculated mainly with features related to consonants and vowels. This research report establishes new measurements of phonological distance that incorporate lexical tone through experimental approaches and modeling, using Hong Kong Cantonese as a case study. Results show correspondences between the experimental data and predictions from information-theoretic measures, including entropy measures and functional load, suggesting that lexical components which play a more crucial role in phonological distance judgments are lexically less predictable as well. Implications for phonological distance measures are discussed.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

This article investigates how dependencies are constructed in prenominal relative clauses of Mandarin Chinese by comparing the comprehension of two types of relative clauses: Possessive Relative Clauses (PRCs), where the head noun is associated with a dependent noun phrase in the embedded clause, and Adjunct Relative Clauses (ARCs), where the head noun takes the whole embedded clause as its complement. The results of a naturalness-rating experiment and two self-paced reading experiments showed distinctive reading patterns of PRCs and ARCs. The comprehension of a PRC is sensitive to the grammatical position of the dependent noun in the prenominal clause: retrieval of a dependent noun at the subject position is less costly than that of a dependent noun at VP-internal nonsubject positions. The comprehension of an ARC reflects the structural frequency of the whole prenominal clause: more-canonical structures like SVO sentences were read faster than less frequent structures such as disposal and passive sentences. These results support the importance of structural locality and subject prominence for constructing gap-filler dependencies in prenominal relative clauses.

Previous research on leader effects has focused exclusively on the impact of voters’ evaluations of leaders on vote choice, disregarding possible effects on the prior step of deciding whether or not to turn out to vote. In line with the personalisation of politics thesis, leaders have a higher impact among dealigned voters. Previous studies have demonstrated that leader effects are stronger among voters who voice their dealignment – namely party switchers. However, the potential impact of leaders among those who exited (i.e., who have abstained) is still unstudied. Could leaders have a mobilisation effect and therefore trigger turnout decisions? What characteristics of party leaders are more relevant in this regard? This article is the first comparative study to examine how the evaluation of party leaders’ traits influences voter turnout in general elections. The work incorporates data from election studies across seven countries with different social contexts (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Hungary). Characteristics of leaders were grouped into two dimensions – competence and warmth – in accordance with the stereotype content model and relevant studies on leaders’ traits evaluation. Multiple binary logistic regression models were performed to analyse the predictive power of competence and warmth on turnout, controlling for sociodemographic, political ideology variables and voters’ past political behaviour. Results reinforce the personalisation of politics theory, showing the utmost relevance of warmth personality traits of leaders in voter turnout decisions. Competence personality traits were found to be relevant only in some situations. Interaction effects were also demonstrated between warmth evaluations and identifying with a right‐wing party as well as past political behaviour with both warmth and competence.

This article examines the syntax of extra be constructions, common in nonprescriptive English and often considered a curiosity, such as: The problem is, is that she hates apples. It has been claimed that there are many different types of extra be constructions, with the two main types being double be and single be, but this article argues that these distinctions are largely superficial. The article reviews previous accounts, presents the complex data, and categorizes most cases of extra be into one unified syntactic construction, the SHARED SHELL-NOUN CONSTRUCTION. It is argued that such constructions are syntactically fairly ordinary biclausal specificational copular sentences, consisting of a setup clause and a resolution clause, which share an argument. A second construction is also proposed for one subset of examples, the LINKING FOCUS BE CONSTRUCTION, where be lexicalizes a left-peripheral focus head.

In past decades, scholars have tended to recommend ‘optimal’ solutions for coping with common-pool resources. Examples exist of both successful and unsuccessful efforts to establish government property, private property, or community property. The absence of any property rights – open access – related to valuable resources is associated with overuse. The resource institutions that research has documented as working well in the field differ substantially in their detailed design but can usually be characterised as adaptive, multilevel governance systems related to complex, evolving resource systems. We need to overcome the tendency to recommend panaceas and encourage, instead, considerable experimentation at multiple levels to reduce the threats of massive collapses of valuable resources.

The debate on regime change has experienced a U-turn. Attention has shifted from the regime transitions occurred during the so-called third wave of democratization to the signals of an incipient reverse trend. However, the actual import and urgency of the problem remain unclear, due to a growing confusion concerning what a process opposite to democratization is, how many distinct forms it can take, and consequently what the empirical referents of the phenomenon are. Building on the notion of “autocratization”, or regime change towards autocracy, the paper elaborates a framework for the comparative analysis of regime changes opposite to democratization. Specifically, we identify political participation, public contestation and executive limitation as the main dimensions of regime variance, define autocratization accordingly, illustrate and systematize the different regime transitions that fall under this label, and clarify what autocratization is not. The proposed conceptual and analytical framework could support future research on comparative autocratization.

What have been the losses and the gains of the shift from women’s studies to gender studies for political science in The Netherlands? What are present-day opportunities and how should we move forward? Our systematic analysis of the Bachelor programmes offered by four Dutch political science departments shows that gender is not a central feature in the current curricula. Gender in political science has become dependent on personal interests and engagements at the individual level rather than being sustained by structural commitments at the departmental level. This article argues that a gender perspective should be part of the analytical toolkit of anyone trained as a political scientist. Students should be made aware that gender is a fundamental aspect of the organisation of power and therefore unambiguously political. Gender awareness impacts upon both students’ academic development and Dutch politics given that many graduates take up jobs in or close to the political environment. With this in mind, being equipped with a ‘gender lens’ will enable students to identify and explain gender inequalities and more importantly stimulate them to develop innovative strategies to close the gaps.