The Nonprofit Almanac, published by Independent Sector (IS), updates and extends the useful compilations of data - much of which were collected in IS-sponsored surveys - that have been published under the title, Dimensions of the Independent Sector. More importantly, it is the first grand application of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), a framework for describing charitable organisations and purposes that has been developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics at IS, and the first major statistical use of the information that non-profits file with the Internal Revenue Service. Does this new data source improve the quality of available information about American non-profits? An examination of the health care section of the Almanac suggests that, at best, the answer is ‘not yet’.

This paper reports on the evaluation of a kitchen garden program in primary schools in Victoria, Australia. It focuses on the motivations, impacts, and issues associated with volunteering in the program. The study revealed that volunteers are drawn from a range of sources, including: families of current and former students, former teachers, local residents, clients of aged care and/or disability services, other schools and communities, local universities, community organizations, the community services sector, and the corporate sector. Benefits to volunteers included: opportunities to use time productively, an increased sense of belonging, learning opportunities, and an increased sense of self-worth and enjoyment. For schools, volunteers enhanced engagement between the school and the local community, enabled them to engage more effectively with hard to reach groups, and increased student engagement. In addition, the involvement of volunteers improved the sustainability of the program, improved communication between teachers and families of students from minority ethnic groups, and gave students the chance to relate to new people, to learn from their experience and to have fun in working with the volunteers. Perhaps the most telling benefits to flow both to students and to volunteers were not the “three Rs—reading, w’riting and a’rithmetic” but the three Cs—confidence, capabilities, and connections. However, a clearly identified issue was the importance of matching volunteers’ motivations and needs with the roles they play to sustain current levels of volunteering and, therefore, the program itself.

Wood and Flinders re-center political participation on the idea of “nexus politics.” The effort is laudable because it contributes to other ongoing efforts at broadening our understanding of the nature of ‘political’ participation. Unfortunately, in our view, the authors misspecify new forms of political participation that have emerged by: (1) failing to take Henrik Bang’s work seriously; (2) focusing exclusively on motivation/intention, so that an action is “political,” only if the person acting sees it as “political”; (3) seeing all political participation as necessarily oppositional.

This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic activities pursued by community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs). Specifically, we study how an organizational commitment and orientation to traditional nonprofit values affect activities that foster collective civic action. We draw on the theoretical frame of institutionalism to examine the role of CBOs as organizational actors that foster civic health through their collective civic action. Our research employs a structural equation model to test associations among several constructs, highlighting the interaction of key variables and activities. Based on our analysis of original survey data, we argue that nonprofits develop a civic capacity through the praxis of nonprofit values, civic health activities, and collective civic action. Our findings extend existing research through new measurement tools that capture the institutional orientation of community-based nonprofits that shapes the nature of their involvement in civil society and collective civic action.

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms.

Jeoung (2020) argues that certain predicates in Indonesian are categorially ambiguous between auxiliaries and lexical verbs. Moreover, she claims that the auxiliary reading has been overlooked in analyses of so-called crossed control in Indonesian. As we show in this reply, however, the auxiliary reading is in fact independent of crossed control.

Food security and food waste are unanimously recognised as relevant issues affecting the whole society and should be therefore acknowledged as a priority on the public agenda. Nonetheless, in many countries the third sector stands in for public actors and operates to tackle both these issues. This paper explores the role of public and third sector in tackling food poverty and food waste, particularly analysing the role of the non-profit organisations involved in the food recovery and redistribution processes in two European regions: Lombardy (Italy) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany). By comparing the two different policy framework and the organisations’ actions, the study recognises the ability of the non-profit sector to create new relationships among different actors (private for-profit, private non-profit as well as public actors) while answering various unmet needs. The paper draws on a mix of secondary and primary data including observations and interviews in the two regions carried out in 2014 and focuses on two relevant case studies (the “Associazione Banco Alimentare” and the “Tafel”).

The purpose of this paper is to estimate popularity functions for the Portuguese Prime Minister, Government, Parliament and President using the ordinary least squares (OLS) and seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) methods. The results indicate that: (1) popularity polls for the Prime Minister and Government are better explained by economic conditions than are similar polls for the Parliament and President; (2) unemployment is a significant variable determining popularity while inflation is not; (3) honeymoon effects are significant; (4) popularity deteriorates over consecutive terms.

There are ongoing management and societal challenges affecting volunteering participation. These place a premium on organizations identifying individuals that currently do not volunteer but have the willingness and capacity to do so, the “Potentials”. Supplementing the limited non-volunteer literature, we seek to quantify this potential volunteer pool using constructs aligned to the willingness, capability and availability dimensions from Meijs et al.’s (Volunt Action 8:36–54, 2006) volunteerability framework. Using binary logistic regression testing with a nationally representative sample of Australian volunteers and non-volunteers, we found partial support for the framework’s willingness and capability dimensions determining volunteer status. We then applied a predictive equation to the non-volunteer sample to calculate their percentage likelihood of volunteering, to identify a cohort of “Potential” volunteers. Further testing revealed statistically significant differences between this cohort compared to other non-volunteers based on various interventions for promoting volunteering. The implications of our novel study and an associated research agenda are discussed.

Pater's (2019) target article proposes that neural networks will provide theories of learning that generative grammar lacks. We argue that his enthusiasm is premature since the biases of neural networks are largely unknown, and he disregards decades of work on machine learning and learnability. Learning biases form a two-way street: all learners have biases, and those biases constrain the space of learnable grammars in mathematically measurable ways. Analytical methods from the related fields of computational learning theory and grammatical inference allow one to study language learning, neural networks, and linguistics at an appropriate level of abstraction. The only way to satisfy our hunger and to make progress on the science of language learning is to confront these core issues directly.

This article analyzes variation in International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. Conditions attached to IMF loans vary qualitatively and quantitatively across time and space, contrary to the allegations of inflexibility and insensitivity. This study theorizes that despite the IMF's official rules to determine conditionality by economic criteria, variation arises because the strategic interests of the five biggest contributors to the IMF (the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany and France) interfere with IMF policy, which potentially compromises the effectiveness of its programs. This theory is tested empirically against 398 conditionality agreements contracted between 1983 and 1997 using an event-count method based on the Poisson distribution to obtain statistical results supportive of the theory.

This article examines the factors that shape party preferences in Turkey by estimating an individual vote intention function that includes both economic and non‐economic factors. The economic variables can be used to test the familiar hypotheses of economic voting theory – whether individuals vote retrospectively and/or prospectively, and whether they are sociotropic and/or egotropic. The non‐economic factors include sociodemographic characteristics as well as identity and issue variables likely to be good predictors of party choice. The analysis focuses on comparing the characteristics of those who intend to vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with those of other parties. According to multinomial logit estimates, young people, especially males, constitute the electoral base for the AKP. Those who have been affected adversely by recent economic developments, as well as those who are against Turkey's accession to the European Union are also more likely to vote for the AKP. The empirical work also provides evidence in support of economic voting hypotheses.

The extant literature on the relations between government and NGOs is limited in two respects—dominant focus on relations between central government and NGOs and a limited discussion of typologies of relations in countries in Africa. This study seeks to make a modest contribution to addressing these limitations by studying the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. This paper proposes a four-dimensional framework for analysing the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. It reports that the relations are varied, complex and multi-dimensional and characterised by superficial and suspicious cordiality; tokenistic and cosmetic collaboration; friendly-foe relation; and convenient and cautious partnerships.

Within the arena of international politics the European Community sometimes acts as an actor, but sometimes it does not. As is shown in this article:‘traditional’ European-integration approaches fail to explain this. The authors introduce an actor concept which seems to overcome such shortcomings. This approach is applied to a study of two action domains of the EC: one on chemicals control policies and non-tariff trade barriers, and the other on the Multi-Fibre Agreements.

The article investigates the intellectual foundations of the political projects led by Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán. We demonstrate that next to homegrown populist and traditionalist ideas, the radicalisation of conservative thought in the West, particularly in the USA, facilitated the illiberal turn of these two countries during the 2010s. The state-, nation- and family-centred narratives, born out of this West–East cross-fertilisation, were then re-exported abroad with considerable financial support from the countries’ respective governments. The collaboration of politicians and intellectuals, and the tolerance within the circle of the critics of liberal democracy, appear as important factors behind their success. The regimes led by PiS and Fidesz provided Western conservatives with a “proof-of-concept”, demonstrating the viability of their ideas and emboldening them to further challenge the liberal consensus.

This paper deals with the 1994 Italian elections to both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. It discusses: the new electoral system introduced for these elections; the realignment of the Italian party system since the previous election; patterns in the election results and the implications of these for the future. The paper argues that crucial differences in electoral law explain differences in the pattern of Senate and Chamber results. Considering regional patterns of voting, only the southern part of the country showed signs of close competition between the main party cartels. Comparing plurality and PR voting at constituency level, the paper highlights the inability of candidates of the left to mobilise supporters of other parties in their cartel in plurality elections, a factor that does not augur well for the left in future elections.