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.

The conventional literature on international cooperation in general, and intergovernmental organization membership in particular, depicts a regular, positive relationship between wealthy capitalist democracies and participation in international institutions. While empirical evidence supports this assertion, it says little about the mechanisms, and the accompanying variation among them, by which states enter into international institutions. This study distinguishes industrialized democracies along two dimensions: the nature of their constitutional structures and the organization of their electoral politics. Variations in these features produce variations in the institutional constraints and electoral incentives that matter in determining state participation in international organizations. Results of a pooled cross‐sectional time series analysis of 23 democracies in 1981 and 1992 indicate that the structure of governing institutions and the nature of electoral systems account for much of the variation in intergovernmental organization membership. This study concludes that domestic institutions matter in determining international cooperation through international organizations – a novel insight overlooked by most international relations theories.

Israeli environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs) are assessed in light of Resource Mobilization Theory, introducing a new method for dividing ENGOs according to strategic orientation. Based on a national survey, 85 groups are categorized as consensus ENGOs that seek understanding aim at finding common grounds, or as conflict ENGOs working “outside the system.” Results show that conflict ENGOs are more grassroots in orientation and consensus ENGOs are more professionalized. Conflict ENGOs operate primarily in local arenas. Consensus ENGOs appear more stable, with larger annual budgets and paid staff, but with fewer registered members. Consensus ENGOs enjoy a wider variety of income sources; receive more funding from government, foreign, and private donations; and have a broader range of self-generated income sources. Conflict ENGOs depend more on membership fees. Both groups are highly dependent on foundation grants. In general, greater resources are associated with consensus activity than among organizations utilizing conflict tactics.

The analysis presented in this paper seeks to outline some of the political consequences of a general decline in the place of the church and religious faith in peoples’ daily lives in the Netherlands. It juxtaposes a reconstruction of religious origins or backgrounds against current assessment of the strength of confessional attachments. Erosion of traditional ties to the church of one's early loyalties is depicted as accompanied by withdrawal from formal participation in the electoral process. Interest in politics and informal participation remain high, but the rejection of institutionalized religion is associated with what appears to be an active rejection of institutionalized politics. For those who do remain in the active electorate, a continued decline in confessional attachment appears to forecast a continued decline in confessional party vote.

Insofar as change in the future involves general depillarization, or decreased political relevance of the church for all degrees of confessional attachment, the political beneficiaries may be the parties of center and right as well as left. An across-the-board drop in level of confessional voting would mean that many voters with strong confessional attachments would be turning to the secular parties and in doing so – if the recent past is any guide – would turn no more often to the left than to the other options open to them. However, insofar as the future brings a decline in confessional attachment without a diminution in the relevance of confessional attachment for confessional voters, the parties of the left will benefit disproportionately as the newly deconfessionalized turn away from the parties of tradition and seek out the parties of change.

Dekker and Ester's (1987) position regarding working class authoritarianism, using Wright's (1979, 1985) neo-marxist class-conceptualization, is challenged. It is shown in replication that Wright's class concepts are only weakly and non-linearly related to ‘class-proxies’ such as income, wealth, educational level and subjective social class. Thus there is reason for doubt regarding the validity of Wright's class-concept, which might be partly responsible for the weak associations found with authoritarianism and authoritarian attitudes. Nevertheless, we found that Dekker and Ester's (1987) hypotheses 1 and 2 cannot be rejected: the working class is somewhat more authoritarian than all other classes combined. We maintain that the well-known relatively strong relationship between educational level and authoritarianism remains of major theoretical and social relevance.

While many scholars have postulated the decline of membership influence as an important consequence of the professionalisation of civil society organisations (CSOs), other analysts have argued that traditional membership-driven CSOs are resilient and that hiring professionals does not necessarily diminish membership influence. This study sheds light on this issue by analysing membership influence in a representative sample of approximately 2000 CSOs from five European countries and the European level. As members generally have a strong influence on CSOs’ policy positions, our analysis demonstrates that the pessimistic tone in much contemporary scholarly work is largely unwarranted. On the contrary, hiring professionals does not invariably decrease membership influence and can, when members are closely engaged in advocacy work, even facilitate it.

The conventional wisdom of domestic politics in the global economy holds that that the globalization of the market economy has spelled the imminent collapse of corporatist bargaining institutions and the corporatist goal of economic equality. This conventional wisdom, however, highlights an interesting puzzle: it was the process of internationalization and economic openness itself that generated corporatist institutions. This study examines whether corporatist institutions are still effective in ensuring the corporatist goal of equality in the ‘global’ economy. Income inequality from the early 1980s to the middle 1990s is used as a measure of institutional effectiveness. It is argued that corporatism, as a form of interest mediation, is a path-dependent institution that generates increasing returns in terms of equality in the most internationalized economies. Results of a panel study of 17 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries indicate that corporatism reduces income inequality and, contrary to the conventional wisdom, income inequality is lowest in the most ‘global’ national economies.

Hindi and several other Indo-Aryan languages contain a discourse marker that has been described as having a wide range of functions, including topic marking, intensive, emphatic, contrastive, and assertive. In Hindi, this function is realized by the enclitic =to. Possible translational equivalents for =to include expressions like in fact, sure, you know, well, as for, at least, finally, and but. This article investigates the diverse uses of =to and argues that the full range can be uniformly accounted for only if =to is taken to be a particle that signals that the question resolved by its prejacent is weak. The analysis treats =to as a generalized downtoner that comments on the strength of the question the prejacent addresses, relative to the speaker's information state, prior discourse moves, and assumptions about the common ground.

As many NGOs find themselves responding to the same crises, they have realized the potential benefits of coordinating their information and communication technology (ICT) activities—sharing satellite communications and internet access, sharing disaster assessment information—and have created cross-organizational coordination bodies. Coordination at the headquarters level across organizations has proven to be insufficient, and some bodies are now engaging ICT personnel in their field offices in coordination efforts. This case study presents the findings of one body’s field office coordination efforts among its ICT workers, where trust building through collaborative activities is revealed to be essential elements in successful coordination across organizations.

For many years, the dissemination of academic research has been controlled by commercial publishers. However, in light of the continuing inflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals, many academics are investigating open access publishing over the Internet. Although most advanced in the natural sciences, given its essentially political character, open access publishing should also be carefully considered by political scientists (and associated disciplines). This article explores open access publishing and suggests the reputational pay-off of ‘normal’ publishing can easily be maintained in the open access realm.

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb's object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual modality.

Media plays a major role in molding US public opinions about Muslims. This paper assesses the effect of 9/11 events on the US media's framing of the Muslim nonprofit sector. Overall it finds that the press was more likely to represent the Muslim nonprofit negatively post 9/11. However, post 9/11, the media framing of Muslim nonprofits was mixed. While the media was more likely to associate Muslim nonprofits and terrorism, they were also more likely to represent Muslim nonprofits as organizations that faced persecution because of Islamophobia, government scrutiny, or hate attacks against them. These media frames may have contributed to public perceptions that Muslim organizations support terrorism while also raising the alarm amongst various stakeholders that the government and the general public are persecuting the Muslim nonprofit sector.