While Carmines and Stimson's work on issue evolutions has prompted research showing the dynamics and effects of new party alignments on abortion, religion, gender and cultural issues, this research has all centred on the United States. This article examines issue evolution in Britain. Using evidence on the timing of changes in elite positions from Comparative Manifestos Group data, and survey data on public attitudes to the European Union with a longer historical sweep than heretofore, the article finds strong evidence that the European issue has followed an issue evolution path, though with distinct dynamics contingent on the pace of elite re‐positioning. Thus, this article extends the theory of issue evolution to a parliamentary political system and demonstrates the responsiveness of the public to elite cues, while also providing additional insights from a unique case in which elites have staked out distinct positions not once, but twice.

Islamic welfare organizations are currently going through processes of ‘NGOization’. Drawing on qualitative data from Pakistan, Norway and the UK (2012–2015), this article examines how two Islamic welfare organizations which are embedded in Islamic political movements, become ‘Muslim NGOs’. The NGOization of Islamic charity signifies not only a change in organizational structure and legal status, but also more profound changes in organizational discourse and practice, and in the ways the organizations make claims to legitimacy. To claim legitimacy as providers of aid in changing institutional environments, the organizations draw on both religious and professional sources of authority. By analysing the NGOization of Islamic charity, the paper brings out the importance of normative frameworks in shaping organizational legitimacy and sheds light on the continued significance of both moral and transcendental aspects of the discourses, practices and identities of Muslim NGOs.

Is the environment a political issue or is it above politics? Do those who fight for environmental protection, the environmental civil society organizations (ENGOs), see the environment as an issue of politics or prefer to conceptualize it as a post-political phenomenon? In most societies, politics is viewed hesitantly. It is equated to activities undertaken legitimately only by the political parties and happening only in a parliamentary space. Political activities are perceived to be a call for destroying the social order and sometimes even an invitation for violence. However, whether the society views the issue of the environment as a political or an apolitical issue impacts the policy decisions. Hence, whether those pursuing environmental protection in environmental civil society organizations (ENGOs) see the environment as political or apolitical is highly significant. Through a survey of 119 ENGOs in the Aegean region of Turkey, this article explores the perspectives of ENGOs and examines how they perceive the nexus between the environment and politics.

To what extent do sub-Saharan Africans actively participate in voluntary groups, and how does development aid influence this involvement? This paper presents a baseline assessment of membership predictors for secular and religious voluntary groups across 20 sub-Saharan African countries. Using Afrobarometer survey data, I adopt an asset-based resources approach in which development aid is seen to mobilize local resources and increase incentives to join voluntary groups. The theory is tested with multilevel, cross-national logistic regression models, including both individual-level and country-level variables to predict active membership. At the individual level, I find that membership in voluntary groups is most likely among those who are well educated, rural-dwelling, male, black, and middle aged—a reflection of social advantage. However, poorer Africans are also likely to join such groups, as are those with a strong religious affinity. At the national level, development aid is positively tied to voluntary group membership, but democratic and economic progresses have little to no consequence on this behavior.

The publication of ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation’ by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in Language in 1974 marked the beginning of what was to be a major shift in the way social interaction was to be conceived of and how it was to be studied across the social sciences and linguistics. Widely regarded as the foundational paper of CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA), it remains the most cited article in Language. While the authors had published CA studies previously (for example, Sacks 1967, 1972, 1973, Schegloff 1968, Jefferson 1972, 1973, 1974, Schegloff & Sacks 1973), ‘A simplest systematics’ was to bring this new approach to a different and, as it turned out, a more receptive audience in linguistics. At its heart the paper demonstrated both THAT routine interaction or ‘conversation’ was highly organized and locally managed and HOW this could be studied systematically and in detail across forms of interaction and interactional contexts. Initiating a new research direction within an established field is difficult enough, but this achievement is made even more impressive coming from a group of sociologists working in connection with Harold Garfinkel's ETHNOMETHODOLOGY (EM; see Garfinkel 1967), who were at the time finding it difficult to publish in their own discipline (Watson 1994).

Nonprofit education and management programs often recognize the efficacy of including experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad in their curricula. In addition, higher education institutions increasingly prioritize global citizenship as a learning outcome. However, challenges abound for educators who want to evaluate study abroad courses that expect students to acquire or deepen their levels of global citizenship. This study seeks to evaluate the impact of a short-course study abroad program on students’ global citizenship orientation. Our qualitative findings suggest that students indeed grapple with the notion of global citizenship in various ways while immersed in such a course. They can also express conflicting views, further confounding scholarly understanding of how to best measure global citizenship. We discuss implications for students expressing more of an observational role than an inclination to act on global issues.

Since the late 1980s, Discourse Analysis has become an increasingly important force within the policy sciences. The core concern of policy studies has been captured as ‘understanding the world and trying to change it at the same time’ (Nelson, 1996). Rooted in the work of Harold D. Lasswell, who called for a ‘policy orientation’ in social science research, policy studies has constantly sought to develop knowledge in order to facilitate policy interventions, and thus to help resolve pressing social problems (Lasswell, 1951). Yet Lasswell's ‘policy science of democracy’ - in which academics were to fulfil an independent role as public intellectuals addressing public problems, not necessarily in alignment with the state - has been far less influential than the more instrumental sorts of policy analysis aiming to facilitate efficient and effective state action.

The growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the rationalist mainstream of instrumental policy analysis led several authors to appreciate the central importance of language for policy analysis.

This paper seeks to explain the process by which an innovative social and solidarity economy initiative allowed a marginalized population that had no say in development activities to meet certain urgent needs and bring about sustainable social and institutional change. The article looks at the case of a solid waste management program initiated by a group of residents and structured around a third sector organization in Cerro el Pino, a hillside slum located in the La Victoria District of Lima, Peru. We analyze this project through a processual model that focuses on three dimensions: context, process, and consequences. The results highlight the role of social and human capital and the presence of various types of knowledge in the implementation of an initiative driven by locals.

This article puts the current cooperative pattern of state-nonprofit relations in France into historical context against the country’s statist past and suggests the implications this experience may have for other countries that share the statist background that France, perhaps in somewhat different form, also embodies. To do so, the discussion first reviews the current shape of the French nonprofit sector and the substantial scope and structure of government support of nonprofit human service delivery that exists. It then examines the unfavorable historical background out of which the current arrangements emerged and the set of changes that ultimately led to the existing pattern of extensive government–nonprofit cooperation. Against this background, a third section then looks more closely at the tools of action French governments are bringing to bear in their relations with nonprofits, the advantages and drawbacks of each, and the nonprofit role in the formulation of public policies. Finally, the article examines the key challenges in government–nonprofit cooperation in the provision of human services and the lessons the French experience might hold for Russia and other similar countries.

It is difficult to understand and impossible to justify, but it is a fact: though post-war Germany was erected both psychologically and economically on the expanding base of a booming economy, German political science up to the present day has not produced a convincing systematic approach which could provide secure guidance for an analysis of the past or the contemporary relationship between economy and politics in this country. In the political science contributions of the immediate post-war years the descriptive positivism of the Gert von Eynern school of political economy (von Eynern 1972) prevailed.