While the scaling of impact remains to be one of the most important issues in the field of social entrepreneurship, limited empirical research has been focused on the topic. One of the first scholarly attempts to build a research agenda to better understand the scaling of social impact was the SCALERS model. Building on initial theoretical and empirical work, this study is based on a sample of 179 nonprofit organizations in Italy. It also extends prior work by providing theoretical grounding through contingency theory and conducting the first empirical test of the situational contingencies of the SCALERS model. A positive relationship between each of the SCALERS variables and scaling—except replicating—has been found. Initial evidence of five contingencies that moderate the relationship between the SCALERS and scaling of social impact has also been found.

Human services nonprofits increasingly provide a social safety net through interorganizational collaboration, and the effectiveness of these partnerships has important implications for the quality and sufficiency of those services. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether partner selection is related to partnership effectiveness and, if so, how. More specifically, the study examines the impact of partner selection on partnership effectiveness and the mediating roles of trust and communication in that relationship. Based on surveys on 201 voluntary human services nonprofit partnerships, trust, and communicative effectiveness are related to satisfaction with partnership outcomes. Trust and communicative effectiveness fully mediated the effects of prior experience and reputation on partnership effectiveness and communication. Interestingly and contrary to some findings from previous research, resource complementarity, homophily, and social networks across organizations’ members, as partner selection factors, were not found to be related to partnership effectiveness. We derived implications for partnership effectiveness research from the results.

Nicolas Sarkozy's reintegration of NATO's military command in 2009 has been presented as radical, given the traditional Gaullist stance of an arm's length relationship with NATO and the US. This article argues first, the difficulty for any French political leader to alter radically the course of French foreign and defence policy; second, that Sarkozy’ policy is merely conforming to a longer-term trend of negotiating between European and Atlantic positions dating from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Dülmer and Klein's comments on our article (see European Journal of Political Research 38: 63–94) fuels once more the discussion about the contextual effects of unemployment on the likelihood of voting for extreme right‐wing parties. Unfortunately, the Dülmer and Klein do not properly evaluate their findings and misrepresent their own results. They do everything to suppress the negative effect of unemployment we previously also found, and miss an opportunity for in‐depth research into the relationship between unemployment and extreme right‐wing voting. They uncover an interesting effect of education varying according to the proportion of immigrants – something we previously ascertained for exclusionist attitudes, but not for voting behaviour.

This article explores the use of podcasts in the learning and teaching of Politics and International Relations in a UK Higher Education institution. The article has three main sections. The first explores the pedagogic issues associated with the use of podcasts. The second highlights examples of good practice for using podcast material in lectures/seminars. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it outlines student attitudes to the use of podcasts within learning and teaching.

This article is concerned with the syntactic position of negation and how that connects to negation's morphological realization and semantic and pragmatic effects. We focus on the case of contracted negation in English, which may appear both before and after the grammatical subject, and which has been classically analyzed as involving a single syntactic element placed by syntactic rule into distinct linear positions. We argue that this analysis is incorrect and that, in fact, there are multiple negations in English which are not related by a syntactic movement rule. We use the rich and complex morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmatic variation in the behavior of negation in varieties of Scots to motivate the argument and to develop a new approach that comes with both empirical and theoretical advantages.

This paper argues that the current academic debate about global civil society has reached a point where some assessment or reflection could be useful for informing the course of future research in the field. Behind this call for an assessment is the very nature of the debate and emerging gaps and weaknesses that together produce a potential slow-down in generating new knowledge and understanding of global civil society. There are several shortcomings to the current research approach: the failure to take account of other civil society traditions; the failure to address the relationship between global civil society, conflict, and violence; and, most critically, the neglect of the notion of civility, both conceptually and empirically. The balance of the paper then explores the implications of this new assessment of global civil society research.

Market models of politics are derived from economic theory where they were advanced in an age of political corruption to achieve four objectives: discipline, universality, liberty and unity in society; only later were such models imported into political discourse. The most pure form of the market model of politics is found in the vote maximization model; yet as a model for political parties and elections, the realism of its assumptions often is held inadequate. While more realistic assumptions generate the vote production model of party strategy, this model rapidly degenerates into the lazy monopolist model which contradicts the role of parties in democracy. The origins of these problems lie in the contradictions within the market ordering principle. Despite these underlying contradictions, market models of politics and parties have gained increasing acceptance both among intellectuals and the general public with numerous implications for the politics of liberal democracies.

No constitutional amendments were made in 1991 and changes of the state institutions were restricted to a reshuffle of ministerial competences resulting from the coalition negotiations between the SPÖ and the ÖVP in late 1990 (Bundesgesetzblatt 45/1991). However, the Chamber of Labour (Arbeiterkammer) and the Chamber of Business (Bundeswirtschuftskummer) were reformed by public law (Bundesgesetzblatt 626/1992 and 620/1992 respectively). Both chambers and the Chamber of Labour in particular had been exposed to criticism from their members and the general public because of poor services to their members (which have no exit option) and cases of corruption. The aim of the reforms was to increase the accountability of the leadership of the chambers and to provide better services to the members, and hence to increase their legitimacy and to enable the maintenance of the Austrian chamber system.

European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights rulings create a form of transnational social citizenship. European judicial activism appears reminiscent of US politics, but is rooted in distinctively European commitments to solidarity. Yet because rights rely on domestic programmes, social citizenship remains vulnerable to retrenchment. This article argues that reforms threaten to transform European social citizenship into a civil citizenship that moves Europe closer to the minimalist US model of social protection.

As Tocqueville observed the emergence of democracy in the USA, he noted the central role religion played in undergirding democratic life. Nearly 200 years later, it is unclear whether religion continues to possess sufficient capacity to promote democratic engagement. This study links organizational theory with research on the structural and cultural characteristics of civil society organizations (CSOs) to assess the current impact of religion on democracy. It analyzes original data from a national study of politically oriented CSOs to determine whether drawing on structural characteristics of religious congregations and cultural elements of religion helps the organizations promote democratic engagement. The analysis finds a positive relationship between organizations that incorporate structural and cultural forms of religion and their organizing capacity, political access, and mobilizing capacity. These findings suggest that religion, mediated by congregations and religious culture, retains sufficient civic vitality to help politically oriented CSOs foster democratic engagement.

It has been assumed that third-sector organizations attract ideologically oriented employees. Therefore, employees consider their work as more meaningful. However, employees’ ideological orientation has not been taken into account in previous studies on work engagement. With this in mind, the present study sets out to apply an extended job demand-resources (JD-R) model in a survey conducted with Finnish third-sector employees (N = 1,412). The results showed that third-sector employees report higher work engagement than employees generally in the work engagement studies. In addition to job demands and resources, work engagement is associated with public service motivation and value congruence. Thus, public service motivation theory offers more insight into third-sector employees’ work engagement than the conventionally used JD-R model.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of comparison: DIFFERENCE comparisons and CONTRAST comparisons. Unlike adjective phrases, noun phrases can occur in contrast comparisons (such as This bird is more a duck than a goose), but not in difference comparisons (#This bird is more a duck than that one is), where the mediation of a partitive particle is necessary (as in more of a duck). The problem is that postulating either semantic gradability or even just ad-hoc, metalinguistic, gradable interpretations for nouns in order to capture the meaning of contrast comparisons results in wrong predictions for difference comparisons and for most other gradable constructions (#very duck, #too duck, #duck enough, #the most duck). This article presents an account that exploits the psychological notion of a CONTRAST SET to explain these data and to correctly predict the truth conditions and characteristic inference patterns of contrast comparisons. Two main conclusions are, first, that if adjectives are degree expressions, so are nouns, and second, that nouns form a different type of degree expression.

Alhough women often played a central role in the creation of non-profit organisations through their donations of time, money and material possessions, their efforts have received little systematic attention from students of the non-profit sector, particularly outside the United States. This special issue of Voluntas traces the ties between philanthropy and women's social, economic and political roles in Argentina, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, India and Australia. Written as part of an international collaborative study co-ordinated by the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, these essays test a variety of theoretical models for assessing the significance of philanthropic activities in empowering disadvantaged groups and fostering the growth of civil society.

This contribution extends research on coalition politics and foreign-policy decision-making to non-democratic settings and, in particular, anocratic regimes. Anocracies have a complex mixture of authoritarian and democratic elements that fragments authority across politically autonomous actors. As in multi-party cabinets in parliamentary democracies, coalition politics thus potentially pervades foreign-policy decision-making. To illustrate this argument, several prominent historical cases of anocracies resorting to war are examined. These well-documented cases provide conceptual and theoretical insights into how coalition decision units and related political considerations can drive and/or distort crisis diplomacy, even at the height of international crisis.

The present study aimed to explore underlying motivational factors of volunteerism at a special sporting event for persons with intellectual disabilities. The volunteer survey (n = 252) assessed sociodemographic characteristics, motives, satisfaction with life, psychological well-being, and affectivity of mainly intrinsically motivated volunteers versus traineeship attendees, doing a compulsory traineeship on occasion of the Innsbruck 2008 Winter Special Olympics. There was no significant variability in the motivation to volunteer scale (MVS) score between the groups. The inventory of approach and avoidance motivation (IAAM) data showed that primarily intrinsically motivated volunteers experienced higher self-gratification through their voluntary engagement. Regression analysis revealed that psychological well-being, satisfaction with life, and positive and negative affectivity was predicted by the IAAM and MVS. Individuals’ personal motives for volunteering appear to correlate with psychological well-being and affectivity and may influence prospective participation.

We present a new phenomenon in inflectional morphology, ‘repartitioning’, based on data from Soq (Trans New Guinea). In repartitioning, the semantic boundary between two sets of morphological forms is redrawn in a single domain; one feature value takes over part, but not all, of the meaning of the other. In Soq the boundary is redrawn between the yesterday past tense and the hodiernal; the domain is the lexeme s- ‘stay’. For this one verb, the yesterday past takes over most of the range of the hodiernal, while the morphological forms remain regular. In clause chains the repartitioned verb surprisingly shows no syntactic effects. We demonstrate key differences from known phenomena, notably syncretism and overdifferentiation. Repartitioning is indeed new. It can be modeled in a theory based on default inheritance, but poses problems for other approaches. Finally, we present a typology of featural mismatches that situates Soq relative to known phenomena.