This paper examines the potential for, and the contradictions inherent in, voluntary sector health service providers acting as consumer representatives. The paper examines a U.K. gay men’s HIV prevention organization to consider whether members are united by their experiences of using services, whether their work involves consumerist strategies, if so whether these are influential, and what tensions emerge from the dual provider/consumer role. Fieldwork was carried out in 1997-98, examining, via documents and interviews, activity between 1992 and 1997. Qualitative analysis was performed. Consumer action is shown to emerge not so much from abstract constructions of consumer interest, but more from the particularities of consumption, which become politicized more powerfully through their attachment to other interests and ideologies.

In this article the extent to which political variables can explain the behaviour of constitutional judges in Italy when dealing with conflicts between the central government and regions is explored. Two competing hypotheses are tested. One hypothesis argues that one should expect some alignment between the political preferences of the judges and the success of the central government primarily due to the appointment mechanism. The other hypothesis suggests that there should be no systematic alignment between the political preferences of the judges and the success of the central government. Unlike previous literature, the empirical results presented in this article seem to confirm that when the Rapporteur and the court's majority are allegedly affiliated with the Prime Minister's coalition, the odds of success of the Prime Minister go up.

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude.

A common form of electoral cycle theory asserts that support for government parties is dependent on the proportion of an inter-election interval which has passed since the last national election. Weekly opinion poll data for the Netherlands are used to test whether or not such ‘cyclical’ patterns of change can be detected in the inter-election periods of 1977–1981 and 1982–1986. The relative merits of two methods of analysis, polynomial regression and ARIMA, are discussed and demonstrated. The latter is shown to be the more suitable of the two; the former may yield misleading outcomes. The analyses reported do not display even a glimpse of empirical support for the alleged cyclical phenomenon. The ARIMA analyses can be used, however, to describe how processes and events in a society impinge on (noncyclical) developments in the electoral support for political parties.

Jewish Hebrew writings spanning the Middle Ages to Modern times across multiple genres frequently include a large number of biblical quotations, often merged semantically and syntactically with the original material. This biblical metatext—mostly employed through metaphors, allusions and allegories—serves as a literary device, fulfils an aesthetic function, and endows the text with didactical, historiosophical or theological depth. This article will focus on the influence of this metatext in Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and will examine cases where it demonstrates a specific type of historical thought, reflective of certain theological perceptions. The article will outline a tentative model of the phenomenon of biblical metatext through its cultural and social functions in traditional Jewish culture. Presenting this phenomenon as an “open work”—a concept developed by Umberto Eco—enables us to more clearly analyze the interaction between author and reader, as well as their creative process.

The relationship between ecological structures and political radicalism is a long-pursued but little-systematized topic among political sociologists. Only recently are we becoming aware of the fact that many of the difficulties in this area actually arise from metascientific preconceptions rather than from the processes themselves. Erik Allardt's analyses of radicalism in Finland are perhaps the best illustration of both the promise and problems of political ecology, and his theories, methods, and metaperspectives are used here as the backdrop for analysing Norwegian data.

One of Allardt's more recent six-fold models is applied to the well-known emergence of Norwegian radicalism between 1900 and 1921. Factor analysis, incorporating both synchronic and diachronic indicators, is used to test the model and the results show a considerable amount of success in predicting the structural basis of radical socialism. Predictors as to moderate socialism prove to be more problematical, however, and it is in the context of this problem that the general relationship between “structural” and “cultural” explanations is taken up. A deeper analysis of the Norwegian case leads to the conclusion that both types of explanation are, or at least should be, complementary turns of a more fundamental research dialectic.

Over the last three decades, Japanese NGOs have become increasingly engaged in the delivery of Japanese foreign aid, and humanitarian responses to national emergencies. Despite these attainments, a lack of recognition for the Japanese NGO sector among the domestic audience remains noticeable. The article proposes that, despite the increasing professionalization and professionalism of the Japanese NGO sector, the activities of practitioners are frequently construed as volunteering. Additionally, the article contends that concerns about the anti-government or “political” undertone to NGO activities and diminishing interest in international cooperation issues constitute a considerable challenge to fostering recognition and building domestic constituencies for development and humanitarian NGOs. Finally, the dominant approach to the non-profit and voluntary sector in Japan promoted by the government in the post-1995/1998 climate is discussed as a consequential hindrance to the process of establishing Japanese NGOs’ aid work as a professional knowledge-based enterprise in the public sphere.

In light of the German government's long‐held preference against EU‐wide fiscal burden‐sharing, a hallmark of the Euro crisis, its support for an EU‐wide debt‐instrument during the COVID‐19 pandemic constitutes a dramatic policy U‐turn. To make sense of the ‘Berlin puzzle’, we develop a theoretical mechanism that explores why an initially reluctant German government heeded to the call for transnational fiscal solidarity: First, to avoid a ‘common bad’ of a large‐scale economic contraction, proposals for an EU‐wide fiscal response became a political imperative. Second, the successful framing of the crisis as ‘nobody's fault’ rendered the call for European solidarity as the dominant standard of legitimacy to which all governments subscribed. Third, governments whose preferences were not aligned with this standard faced mounting normative pressure and isolation. As a result, governments changed their positions, but not their preferences. We probe this mechanism by carrying out a process‐tracing analysis of the German government's fiscal policy U‐turn in the crucial months preceding the adoption of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery plan in July 2020. The paper contributes to the growing literature on fiscal burden‐sharing in the EU by demonstrating when and how member states can change their stance on transnational fiscal burden‐sharing.

The purpose of this introductory article is to set implementation research in a political science setting. We understand it as having a distinctive and central place within the discipline. We argue that implementation research is not public administration research in disguise. Its frame of reference is not formal constitutional organization but the arrangements and procedures of the living constitution. And implementation research is not just public policy analysis by another name. Its ordering principle is not policy problems as defined and addressed by the ‘political system’ but policy problems as defined and addressed by relevant societal actors. The importance of implementation research for political science is that it offers scope for empirical constitutionalism: to ask, first, what are the organizational arrangements which generate policies and their effects, in order to ask, second, which of those various arrangements are or could be made optimal forms from a prescriptive constitutional perspective. Implementation research acknowledges the written constitution-but also the living constitution. It is a mind-set for sceptical enquiry into the structure and functions of policy processes, and to confront these manifestations of the living constitution with the prescriptions of the written.

This article offers a critical investigation of one indicator of support for democracy frequently used by comparativists. Departing from a theoretical multidimensional model of political support, and drawing on large-scale public opinion surveys, we argue that the survey item ‘satisfaction with the way democracy works’ is not an indicator of support for the principles of democracy. Rather, it is an item that taps the level of support for the way the democratic regime works in practice. At the same time, we show that this item is far from a perfect indicator of support for the performance of a democratic regime, since it is highly sensitive to different institutional contexts. By demonstrating empirically some of the problems involved when trying to asses the levels of support for democracy in post-communist Europe, we argue for a more cautious approach when analysing problems of legitimacy in processes of democratic consolidation. We also advocate the need for multiple indicators when analysing political support.

In this article the growing dissent and tension with regard to the relationship between political factors, public policy-formation and the consequences (in terms of economic performance) will be investigated. Our point of departure is to find out to what extent political variables matter and which other factors may account for the above relationship. The main result is that, apart from the impact of ‘politics’, the existence of a corporatist mode of interest-mediation and conflict-regulation consistently strengthens the explanation of policy-formation and policy-performance. In addition, it appears that, especially after 1974, political factors gain influence, albeit more often than not in circumstances of political consensus and where right-wing parties are relatively weak. If the interdependence between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ is managed in a consensual fashion, it will lead to a better economic performance and may be an adequate response to the ongoing crisis.