This article looks beyond economic explanations of the financial crisis in Iceland, and focuses on the political preconditions for the crisis. The argument is that liberalization of the economy, privatization of the banking sector and lax regulation, together with looting strategies from investors, explain both the rise and fall of the financial sector in Iceland. By examining the historic development of the Icelandic financial sector from 1991 until 2008, I show how fundamental changes, through liberalization and Europeanization, in the economic system made the crisis possible. Data have been collected from official government documents, newspapers, research papers and published reports.

This article expands the limited literature on civil society legislative advocacy in the Arab world by examining the frequency of Civil Society Institutions’ (CSIs) legislative advocacy in Jordan, an Arab competitive authoritarian monarchy. The article explores the impact of authoritarian control and organizational factors on CSIs’ legislative advocacy. Based on 82 semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study finds that there is a low frequency of legislative advocacy among Jordanian CSIs. Financial resources, access to legislators, and perceptions of legislators’ interest in advocacy affect CSI legislative advocacy. In contrast, public funding and the law governing CSIs do not affect CSI legislative advocacy. The findings add to both the literature on advocacy in general and on legislative advocacy in particular, and open up new areas for research.

In stark contrast to the robust social safety nets found in many developed nations around the world, the modern American welfare state is increasingly operated by a variety of non-governmental actors and voluntary organizations. The operation of this welfare regime depends on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats confront new circumstances, their discretionary decisions change. Normative institutionalism and the concept of bricolage are used to explore how discretionary decisions change within an organizational role in the context of a voluntary organization. Understanding this process of bricolage sheds light on the decision-making processes of street-level bureaucrats, explains how behavior in an organizational role shifts over time, and points to the dynamic nature of institutions. We present an in-depth qualitative study of the emergency food network in Oregon as a critical case to illustrate this argument.

Are politicians more rational decision makers than citizens? This article contributes to the ongoing debate by examining how politicians and citizens assess the fairness of the process leading to a controversial policy decision. It contains theories as to why it is tempting to match the favourability of policy decision with a fairness assessment of the preceding process, and how politicians and citizens differ in their approach to the task. Having derived three hypotheses, parallel scenario experiments are run in large samples of Swedish politicians and citizens, in which the outcome and fairness of a policy decision process are manipulated. As predicted, it is found that both politicians and citizens match the favourability of the decision with the assessment of the process, that these self‐serving biases are stronger among politicians, and that policy engagement accounts for the group‐level difference.

Racism and xenophobia are no longer isolated issues affecting only small portions of a society. Rather, these issues are now at the forefront of debate and have assumed a position on the frontlines of political warfare. In 2016, both the UK and the USA found themselves embroiled in bitter battle, a battle wherein the citizens themselves became their own worst enemies. The Leave/Stay campaigns in the UK and the 2016 US presidential campaign precipitated a rebirth of nationalism, reinvigorating entire populations and charming even the casual observer into political action and discourse. Yet in both cases, what began as an endeavour to serve the needs of the citizenry morphed into a battleground of derision and division. As this article reveals, the parallels between campaigns are not merely provocative they are disarming.

Changes in the party composition of the Senuto dellu Repubblicu normally occur only as a consequence of elections which are held jointly with those for the Lower Chamber (Camera dei Depututi). In 1991, however, a major change did occur as a result of the demise of the Purtito Comunistu Ituliuno (PCI) and the birth of the Purtito Democratic0 dellu Sinistru (Democratic Party of the Left - PDS) and of the Rifonduzione Comunistu (Communist Refoundation - RC).

This article examines the role of subjecthood in the domain of anaphoric binding through the lens of West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language with ergative alignment. West Circassian reflexives and reciprocals display a puzzling mismatch in binding directionality with transitive ergative-absolutive predicates. Reflexives treat the ergative agent as the structurally higher argument, with the bound pronoun appearing in the position of the absolutive theme. A reciprocal pronoun, by contrast, appears in the ergative position and is bound by the absolutive theme, suggesting that the absolutive theme is structurally superior to the ergative agent. The article demonstrates that both anaphors are constrained in crosslinguistically familiar ways, but reflexives are subject to an additional licensing condition that limits the set of possible antecedents to the highest argument in the thematic domain. By demonstrating that structural superiority is domain-sensitive, the article challenges the significance of subjecthood as a grammatical primitive and argues that it should be replaced with a tree-geometrical notion of contextually determined prominence.

This article argues that process tracing is a viable and suitable methodological alternative to probe the implications of formal models specifying how the dynamics of belief formation may systematically cause bargaining failures under uncertainty. I illustrate the argument with a brief case study of the failure of the European Defence Community in postwar Europe.

This study proposes a design for and examines the effects of a PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING approach to the promotion and assessment of deep learning in undergraduate linguistics education. Specifically, it reports on how the higher-order learning outcomes are achieved by students through a semester-long problem-solving task in an introductory Spanish linguistics course. Specific teaching strategies are described, and achievement is measured by student grades, self-evaluations, and reflections. This approach has proven effective for stimulating such higher-order thinking skills as (i) applying knowledge of the material to solving linguistic problems, (ii) developing skills in research and critical analysis, and (iii) developing a professional work ethic.

The second winner of the Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award (in 2004) was Professor Erich Weede from the University of Bonn, Germany. The prize, which is sponsored by two sections of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR), goes tri-annually to a political scientist who made major contributions to peace and conflict research in the tradition of Lewis Frye Richardson (1881–1953), a British meteorologist and pioneering scientific analyst of international war. This essay summarises some of the most important insights of the present award holder.

This article explores the role of private, nonprofit organizations in a self-governing society. A framework identifying the diverse theories that explain the various types of nonprofit organizations observed in contemporary American society is sketched. This provides a fuller understanding of the varied and complex ways that nonprofit organizations contribute to the institutions of governance.

This paper uses the case of rural compulsory education promotion to explore corporate philanthropists’ involvement in long-term social development in China. By reviewing corporate donation, CSR programs, and presenting the organizational and program characteristics of 52 foundations setup by corporate elites, the paper shows that corporate philanthropy in China is at an early stage of development; corporate philanthropists participate in social development mainly through donation to government and government-organized-nongovernmental organizations; and they are more enthusiastic about supporting infrastructure projects. The paper also points out that corporate philanthropists possess the power of money, which can be used to promote the professionalization of the Chinese nonprofit sector.

We feel pleased and honoured that Alt and Chrystal (1982) respond at such length to our contribution in this journal and elsewhere (Frey and Schneider, 1978; 1981; 1982). Without mentioning it, the two authors address themselves to a limited part of our paper only, the one referring to the United Kingdom, leaving out of account the models and empirical estimates for the United States and West Germany.

Alt and Chrystal claim to present a politico-economic model ‘rooted in actual institutional behaviour’. It is difficult to detect, however, any analysis of such (governmental) behaviour. To cite the intended actions of a committee at a particular period and for a particular country is no substitute for a serious study of what motivates and constrains politicians and administrators. Alt and Chrystal maintain that these decision-makers want to keep expenditures a stable share of anticipated national income, but no reason is given why they should desire to do so. ‘Explaining’ government expenditures by national income of the same period is rather uninformative, and does not allow us to make any true forecast of what the government is going to do, except ex post facto, when the level of national income is known.

Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role of feminist research in democratic theory. She also opens perspectives toward mending the divide between a politics of recognition and a politics of distribution.

South European labour markets have gone through a substantial level of downward adjustment in wages (internal devaluation) and liberalisation in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. Yet, there have been differences in the extent of change between Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. These differences cannot be explained by the size of the economic crisis alone. While existing analyses focus on the extent of external pressure or party ideologies, this article focuses on the pre‐existing level of regulation by the state as opposed to regulation by social partners. It shows that devaluation and liberalisation were the most extensive in countries where governments possessed more tools to force down wages (statutory job protection, state regulations of collective bargaining, minimum wages), sometimes even against the will of employers. In contrast, countries with a higher level of autonomy for social partners (and fewer policy instruments available to governments to influence wages) devalued less. In some cases, the crisis led to more power to the state, rather than less. The article shows that state intervention can be a facilitator rather than a barrier to wage adjustment.