This article examines the links between legitimacy, politicisation and the rise of political dissensus in the context of the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). In particular, it assesses democratic, technocratic and procedural legitimacy against the vertical, inter-level relations between EU institutions and national authorities in the elaboration of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), with a particular focus on the case of Italy. The article shows that the implementation of the RRF tends to centralise powers in national executives and their technical-administrative structures to the detriment of national legislatures. This gives rise to a “legitimacy disequilibrium” in the implementation of the RRF characterised by a strong technocratic and a weak democratic legitimacy. Challenging the coordinative Europeanisation literature, the article thus argues that the implementation of the RRF is potentially subject to dynamics of politicisation. As a matter of fact, the observed legitimacy disequilibrium resulting from the implementation of the RRF is open to politicisation from party actors in the member states, thus assuming salience in national public debates. Finally, the article illustrates how the politicisation of NRRPs can become a factor in the wider process of political dissensus in the EU, involving contestation by different types of actors (EU institutions, member state governments and national parties), operating at different levels (EU and national), and with different aims.

Salamon argues that the nonprofit sector is the core or “center” of civil society. He correctly diagnoses the nonprofit sector’s problems but his proposal to “hold the center” through sectoral renewal and a partnership model of state-nonprofit relations is problematic. This is the case in part because the effects of economic globalization are reducing nation-state autonomy. In addition, fragmentation of social identity in a postmodern era challenges sectoral legitimacy, while devolution and localization of social welfare responsibilities reduce nonprofit effectiveness. On the basis of U.S. evidence, I argue that, rather than trying to hold the center, we should decenter the nonprofit sector—away from dominant institutions, powerful groups, and privileged places—and join the margins in an effort to weave a new, more humane and inclusive social contract.

This article uses the theory of recognition to analyze sectarian conflicts in Iraq. After describing the sectarian and historical background of contemporary Iraqi politics, the article critiques the implementation of consociationalism and policies influenced by liberal multiculturalism in deeply divided societies. It argues that these policies lead to a dangerous reification of identities. The article argues that a progressive implementation of deliberative democracy practices could improve identity-related issues in Iraq and explains how democratic practices are legitimized by the most influential Islamic religious figure in Iraq.

This article analyses four decades of annulment cases against the European Commission brought before the European Court of Justice by dissatisfied Member States. Annulment cases are interpreted as incidents of a struggle between Member State governments and the Commission about policy decisions. Studying annulment cases for the first time in comparative perspective, three important patterns of variation are identified: with respect to the evolution of annulment cases over time, as regards the Member States as plaintiffs and in view of policy fields. Subsequently the data are interpreted on the basis of structure, agency and policy field specific explanatory mechanisms. Leaving the aggregate level, the two policy areas that account for more than 80 per cent of annulments are analysed: EU agriculture and competition policy. In the vast majority of cases, the dominant rationale behind annulments is not national objections to the supranational exercise of delegated powers per se or in specific policies (as most structural theories would expect) but to the way the Commission uses these competences to restrict how national governments may allocate European or national funding.

What is the matter with the German parties? Why this crisis of acceptance and vexation? Have they not led the Federal Republic in more than four decades firmly and safely from the ashes left by an unprecedented dictatorship into a stable, wealthy and well-recognized democracy? Can't we feel satisfied with this and, indeed, weren't we for quite a long time during which Germany became renowned for its exceptionally stable and concentrated party system? What has changed since those days of political tranquility, that political parties and politicians are now at an all-time low of public esteem, that people turn away from their favorite parties and either abstain from voting, or turn to the right-wing Republikaner (in the West) and to the leftwing PDS (in the East), and that even President von Weizsacker charges the parties with an obsession with power and with incompetence (von Weizsacker 1992)?

The paper describes how the non-profit sector in East Germany has passed through several distinct phases in recent years. It shows how the role of the non-profit sector under the system of party dominance and centralised economic and social planning signified a major contradiction of East German society: the artificial under-development of civic society in eastern Europe's most successful economy. During the first phase of the transition period in late 1989, the expression and manifestation of political views was predominant. With the disintegration of the socialist party-state, the needs for social service provision increased. West German organisations have increasingly become the dominant factor in East German non-profit sector affairs. The paper argues that the East German non-profit sector will emerge as a slightly poorer and more secular version of its West German counterpart.

The interdependencies and conflicts between civil society and welfare states are of continuing interest and controversy among civil society researchers. Particularly, issues of motivation, collaboration, management, and institutional contexts have been subject to extensive scrutiny. Less prominent on this research agenda, the issue of public perceptions and legitimacy is highly relevant to the conversation on welfare state and civil society. This study contributes on this topic by investigating the public legitimacy of volunteer involvement in public welfare services. The article presents findings from a qualitative interview study of perceptions of welfare institutions conducted in 2013–2014 among 115 participants from Sweden and Denmark. The hypothesis investigated is that the Nordic model of welfare is legitimized by its public nature to a degree which excludes volunteers from legitimately contributing as part of public welfare institutions. Findings suggest that volunteers are held in high regard among Swedes and Danes, but the involvement of volunteers in public welfare provision is deemed both a threat to the Nordic model of Welfare and matter-out-of-place in regards to the role the interview participants ascribed to volunteers and civil society.

The ERC grant system has had a significant impact on the academic profession in Europe, by enforcing norms about what constitutes a promising research career, increasing the autonomy of individual top scholars and facilitating competition between universities. Winning an ERC starting grant has a considerable effect on individual career prospects. A grant significantly increases the likelihood of promotion, and the effect seems to be robust to a potential “selection bias” or individual research performance. While the grant increases the negotiation position of the grant winner, moving to another university is rare. Increased visibility and prestige within the university seem to contribute to career progress.

Civic participation among today’s youth is a topic of widespread concern for policy-makers, academics, and the publics of Western countries at large. Though scholars have increasingly become aware of deep-rooted social inequalities in access to volunteering in the adult population, differences in opportunity structures that facilitate participation among young people are rarely recognized. In this paper, I put forward a ‘life-track perspective’ on youth volunteerism that highlights crucial within-group differences among youths. I present empirical findings from a unique Danish national survey with multiple waves enriched with national register data. The study sheds light on the changing importance of longstanding dividing lines—gender, social class, and education—in volunteering trends among the young. While young people are seemingly more gender-equal in their volunteering behavior than older cohorts, higher education as a gateway to volunteering is of much greater importance among the young. This educational ‘elitism’ in volunteering has, furthermore, intensified among young people between 2004 and 2012.

There is an often-noted gap between political scientists and policymakers. This article examines the related but less investigated gap between political scientists and the engaged public. Reasons for the gap are explored by making inferences about public preferences through an examination of New York Times non-fiction bestsellers on politics from 1985 to 2009. The analysis suggests that although non-fiction readers have an interest in a wide range of political issues, political scientists often fail to reach the engaged public for several reasons, such as due to the public’s increasing consumption of books of a partisan or ideological nature versus the norm of objectivity in academic research. On the basis of an examination of bestsellers on politics, this study explores the nature of the engaged public – political science divide and considers ways of potentially bridging the gap.

The article describes the history and the process of editing the Czech Journal of Political Science. First, it puts the journal into the general context of the development of Czech political science. The journal is now one of three well-established political science journals in the Czech Republic, and invites contributions in all subfields of the discipline. The article discusses the limitations of a social scientific journal published predominantly in a small-nation language. Second, it focuses on the particular steps of the editing process. It primarily describes the peer review process.

This study aims to present the progress and development in research carried out on the strategies put into practice at nonprofit organisations. To this end, we carried out a systematic review of the literature making recourse to the ISI Web of Knowledge platform for the data collection process that resulted in the 62 scientific articles (published between 1981 and 2016) analysed in this review. This analysis correspondingly sets out a description of the studies, a timeframe for their respective dates of publication and details about the research methods applied. The results convey how, over the last four decades, there have been a range of studies of nonprofit organisation strategy-related themes with the greatest incidence clustered around the terms strategic management, strategic planning, strategic typology (Miles and Snow 1978), innovation strategies and the strategic management of human resources. We found that the 1980s focused on the theoretical foundations of strategy in nonprofit organisations and the 1990s showed a theoretical consolidation of strategy in nonprofit organisations. The first decade of the twenty-first century shows a focus on improving the management of nonprofit organisations, and in the past decade there has been a diversification in the strategies adopted by these organisations. We furthermore set out suggestions for future research alongside the theoretical and practical implications of this study.

Faith-based development organizations (FBOs) have been argued to deliver more cost-efficient development projects than their secular counterparts through exclusive access to faith networks, which provide predictable decentralized funding, the recruitment of volunteers, low employee salaries, and less overhead and indirect costs. To date, however, comparative analyses of religious and secular organizations have relied on a case-by-case approach, limiting the generalizability of findings. This study addresses this methodological gap by analyzing Registered Charity Information Return filings and organizational websites of 844 Canadian development NGOs to determine the proportion of FBOs and their organizational distinctiveness. The results show that FBOs comprise 40% of the Canadian NGO sector in terms of the number of organizations and their expenditures in developing countries, and are significantly less reliant on federal funding (p < .1), pay employees lower salaries (p < .01), but do not exhibit a significant difference in their expenditures on overhead and indirect costs. Thus, Canadian FBOs participation in faith networks shapes their organizational modus operandi but does not result in a low overhead alternative to secular NGOs.