Throughout the past three decades, changing governments in Denmark have been cultivating a more proactive role for civil society organizations by emphasizing the legitimacy of voluntary social work as part of the social service provision in a hard-pressed welfare state. At the same time, political and public actors praise the civic virtues and democratic skills that volunteers obtain when participating in any kind of voluntary organization. This notion of voluntary organizations as “schools for democracy” already lacks empirical grounding. Given the increased instrumentalization of voluntary social work, it becomes even more important to ask what the modes of participation look like among volunteers within the new organizational forms. In this article, we review key trends and changes at the institutional level and present data from a long-term ethnographic study that explores the mode of participation of volunteers within an organizational form that responds to the demands of the current civic landscape. We demonstrate that while the organizational form in question aptly and strategically navigates the competitive, welfare-oriented, institutional environment, the space for civic action among the volunteers is limited.

Many US-based religious groups engage in networked relationships with religionists in countries elsewhere around the world, investing millions of dollars and personnel hours annually. Evangelical or fundamentalist groups alone do not account for all this network activity; even more liberal-leaning Christian denominations engage extensively in transnational relationships. This inductive study begins with a description of the scope of global network involvement by so-called mainline Christian bodies in the US, then examines in greater detail the structure and context of the transnational ties of one denomination, the Episcopal Church, using data drawn from surveys and four indices relevant to the study of civil society. The potential implications of these transnational religious networks, especially for civil society in developing regions, are tentatively explored by considering ideological differences between religionists linked by network ties.

Over the past ten or twelve years, research on political parties has developed in all Central and East European (CEE) countries. Because the prerequisite for this research is the formation and existence of competing political entities, research on political parties did not come into being until after 1989. In this brief article, I focus on the development of political parties research in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. I provide a discussion of the main topics of research, and a brief description of the institutions and researchers in each country.

In the beginning, most empirical research was conducted by sociologists. Though not as advanced as their West European counterparts, they were methodologically better prepared. There were few, if any, people with degrees in political science, and deparments and research institutes had yet to be established.

Analysis of the spatial pattern of voting at elections, of the changing pattern between two elections, and of the correlates of these patterns (usually involving ecological assumptions) has traditionally involved using a percentaged statistic as the dependent variable. Thus, for example, attempts to account for the distribution of the Labour vote in Great Britain may use the percentage of 1) the electorate, 2) those who voted, or 3) those who voted for the two (Conservative and Labour) parties as the dependent variable in a series of ecological regressions (as in Miller, 1977). In countries such as Great Britain and the United States the dominance of two parties has meant that such analyses are relatively comprehensive. An analysis of the ecological correlates of percentage voting Democrat in the United States, for example, has as its complement an implicit analysis of the percentage voting Republican. Such inductions, however, are not readily made in multi-party situations.

Existing research on alternative forms of political participation does not adequately account for why those forms of participation at an “everyday” level should be defined as political. In this article we aim to contribute new conceptual and theoretical depth to this research agenda by drawing on sociological theory to posit a framework for determining whether nontraditional forms of political engagement can be defined as genuinely distinctive from traditional participation. Existing “everyday politics” frameworks are analytically underdeveloped, and the article argues instead for drawing upon Michel Maffesoli’s theory of “neo-tribal” politics. Applying Maffesoli’s insights, we provide two questions for operationally defining “everyday” political participation, as expressing autonomy from formal political institutions, and building new political organizations from the bottom up. This creates a substantive research agenda of not only operationally defining political participation, but examining how traditional governmental institutions and social movements respond to a growth in everyday political participation: nexus politics.

When Harold D. Lasswell received a grant from the Social Science Research Council for 1927-28, he came to Europe and spent it all on what was then the latest fashion: undergoing psychoanalysis. One cannot help wondering whether todays grant awarding authorities would be so broad-minded, but in this particular case, their investment paid off. With books such as Psychopathology and Politics (1930) and Power and Personality (1948), Lasswell can be regarded as one of the pioneers of the study of psychological processes in politics, of political psychology.

I regard the label ‘political psychology’ as something of a misnomer (it can also be read as a politically inspired, or politicised, psychology). But it has grown into a major sub-discipline of political science (and to a lesser degree of psychology), with its own association, the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). The ISPP holds annual scientific meetings attracting psychologists and political scientists.

Fraudulent activities against European Community resources (European Community fraud) can be shown to have various direct and indirect effects on the institutional system of the Community and the changes it undergoes. In a period characterized by a relative strengthening of Community institutions, fraud has become an issue in the organizational politics of the Community. Community fraud has been a symptom of strains in relations between the Community and member states as well as in intra-Community institutional relations, exposing problems and difficulties in cooperation. At the same time, the issue of Community fraud has been a stimulus for expansion in the development of the Community's institutional system and has functioned as a vehicle of various ideas and designs on the future directions of the Community's organizational structure.

In Norway, as in the other Nordic countries, sector‐based policy making in local government is considered a problem as it is alleged to take place at the expense of a more integrated approach. Inspired by American rational choice theories on committee power, this article first sets out to establish whether the distributive rationale of the present committee system actually does promote sector‐orientation among local politicians. This approach is challenged by alternative theories on committee power, focusing on the informational rationale in specialisation and the relevance of partisanship. The findings suggest that all the three theories explain in part committee member’ preferences, but partisanship is most important for explaining both spending preferences and preferences on organisational forms. The article goes on to explore whether recent local council reforms, intended to replace the sector‐oriented system with strong committees by a new de‐specialised system with weaker committees, are likely to curb the effect of sector on committee members’ preferences. The conclusion here is not easy to draw, but it is clear that sector‐orientation is not encouraged by the reforms; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. What local councils may have overlooked, however, is the influence of the informational rationale on committees and their members. The analyses are based on data obtained from a random sample of 119 of Norway's 435 municipalities.

This article introduces the Debate on editing and publishing (in) Political Science and International Relations journals in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The Debate brings together editors of PoliSci and IR journals published in four CEE countries to examine the practice of publishing (in) these disciplines and explore the diverse strategies journals, and their editors employ to navigate the semiperipheral context of CEE. Going beyond structuralist accounts of semiperipheral inferiority, we introduce CEE journals as institutions endowed with agency, self-reflection and responsibility towards their academic communities. The Debate discusses if and in which sense these journals try to become (limited) innovators, how they are bound by different conditions stemming from the national or regional contexts, how they work with or challenge them and which opportunities they exploit to advance their goals.

Court reporters are certified at either 95% or 98% accuracy, depending on their certifying organization; however, the measure of accuracy is not one that evaluates their ability to transcribe nonstandard dialects. Here, we demonstrate that Philadelphia court reporters consistently fail to meet this level of transcription accuracy when confronted with mundane examples of spoken African American English (AAE). Furthermore, we show that they often cannot demonstrate understanding of what is being said. We show that the different morphosyntax of AAE, the different phonological patterns of AAE, and the different accents in Philadelphia related to residential segregation all conspire to produce transcriptions that not only are inaccurate, but also change the official record of who performed what actions under which circumstances, with potentially dramatic legal repercussions for everyday speakers of AAE.

Although survey research is one of the most frequently used methods for studying charitable giving, the quality of the data is seldom stated or known. In particular, social desirability bias (SDB) has been found to distort data validity where respondents tend to over-report what is socially desirable and vice versa. We argue that this phenomenon has not been fully understood in the nonprofit context as existing social desirability scales are not appropriate to be used in giving surveys. Thus, this paper is the first to extend understanding of SDB to the nonprofit context and to explore its motivating factors. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review and qualitative interviews with various senior practitioners from the fundraising and marketing research sectors, it is suggested that SDB is a multidimensional construct yielding five dimensions, namely, impression management, self-deception, level of involvement, perceived benefits and social norms. The paper then discusses the implications for nonprofit researchers and concludes with directions for future research.

The dramatic rise of charitable crowdfunding has changed the landscape of fundraising and giving. Little empirical work, however, has been done to explore critical factors that are associated with successful charitable crowdfunding campaigns run both by formal charities and non-charities. To advance the literature on donation-based charitable crowdfunding, we draw on a unique dataset of 427 COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns in China, examining whether and how external and internal quality signals are related to crowdfunding success measured by total donation amount. Our results show that crowdfunding success is positively associated with internal signals (updates and predefined duration), whereas the role of external signals (platform and award) is less certain. While we find a positive relationship between award information and funding success, informal campaigns using an alternative medium seem to generate more donations than formal campaigns using authorized platforms. The implications of this study for theory, practice and policy are also discussed.

One of the most effective mechanisms for obtaining an overview of the general direction of political science in a particular country is an examination of the output of its journal literature. This article lists the contents of the 1996 issues of selected European political science journals from a range of European countries (normally, those published by national political science associations) and comments on their content. Recent developments in three types of publishing on the world wide web are also reviewed and the relevant addresses are supplied. First, print journals increasingly maintain a minimal presence on the web, but in certain cases this extends a good deal further, to include abstracts or even the full texts of selected articles and links to related resources. Second, European governments are now all represented on the web in one form or another, though they vary greatly in terms of the range of governmental institutions covered and in the volume of documentation available. Third, the huge increase in political coverage on the web makes the indexing of this material all the more important, and we offer a listing of the major guides to national political science resources.

The impact of AIDS on Western polities serves as a useful indicator both of social values and of political and organisational relationships. At the same time, community-based nonprofit organisations have been at the forefront of AIDS policy-making and service development. Taking Britain and Germany as case studies, this paper discusses similarities and differences in the functions accorded to the voluntary sector in the pattern of responses to HIV and AIDS. Typical problems confronted by emergent voluntary sector welfare agencies are noted and particular features of AIDS service organisations described. Separate accounts are then given of the development of a federated network of AIDS service organisations (ASOs) in Germany and of contrasting experience in the UK. While governments have shared a concern to confine the activity of ASOs to serving the needs of those groups directly affected by AIDS, other significant differences in policy development may be attributed to differences in the organisational structure of the health sector.