Various aspects of the concept of ‘control’ are discussed in order to clarify some ambiguities, and illustrated using research on regulation in Denmark, West Germany and the USA. An increasing interest in the role of values in the process of control is found in recent research, and is contended that future research in this field should be based on ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ approaches, because the latter prevent the analyst from grasping the range of different values that affect the conduct of actors.

Very little attention has been devoted by third sector researchers to the question of comparable or related activities in Asia. This article explores a complex of Asian Buddhist religious beliefs and practices using ‘the commons’ as a comparative concept. Examination of published, English-language sources provides clear evidence of the existence of a variety of third sector-like activity in Asia far in the past. Village codes codifying charitable practices and village associations have been recorded in China, Japan and Korea. In addition, a good deal of charitable and philanthropic activity has been associated with Asian Buddhism: beliefs supporting gift exchange (dharma and dana), veneration of certain leader-philanthropists, a distinctive model of community organisation (sangha), a Japanese model of fund-raising (hinjin) campaigns, and a long tradition of international Buddhist convocations are among the range of indigenous common goods which can be found in the Asian context prior to any discernible western influences.

In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide, Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium – Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khanani – are all sympathetic to the interpretivist approach to social science concepts, but challenge Schaffer on important points. Above all, they focus on three broad questions: how does the researcher gain a critical distance from what she studies, and what does this mean for the concepts she is using? What is the nature of concepts, that is, what is the concept of ‘concept’ we use? And, what is the relationship between concepts and visual signs such as paintings?

While the benefits the volunteers offer nonprofit organizations are substantial, they can also cause problems for these groups. In an environment where people willingly donate their time and energy to a cause that they ostensibly support, why is disruptive behavior so common? This ethnographic study of volunteers at an animal shelter identifies the factors that lead to problematic behavior. The paper argues that disruptions occur when there is a mismatch between the needs of the volunteer and the needs of the organization and because of structural conditions that lead to uncertainty among volunteers. These findings shed light on volunteer behavior broadly and present the opportunity to address disruptive behavior. As a result, the benefits the volunteers provide for an organization can be maximized.

Roubini and Sachs provided the first systematic test of the idea that political structure the size, composition, diversity, and/or stability of a governing cabinet - is related to budget deficits. In this paper, we take issue with several of Roubini and Sachs' choices concerning data and operationalization, and argue that their approach cannot offer clear conclusions about the relationship between national political structure and budget deficits. We test the ‘strength of government’ hypothesis using central government finance data on 16 countries, 1959–1990. We measure deficits in a way that maximizes comparability across countries but avoids the potential problems of standardizing by GDP. We examine carefully the definition and measurement of ‘strength of government’, in light of recent theoretical and empirical work in comparative politics. We perform pooled time-series regression analysis of deficit change in 16 OECD countries for the period 1959–1990. We argue that while structural differences between governments may have little impact on deficits during good economic times, they may become especially noticeable and influential during periods when governments struggle to cope with severe economic problems.

This study examines the relationship between famine exposure and individual philanthropic donations, drawing on data from the 2012 China Family Panel Survey and the 1982 Population Census of China. By analyzing the long-term impact of the 1959–1961 Chinese famine on survivors' donation behaviors, we aim to understand how such man-made severe life experiences influence philanthropic actions. We employed a cohort difference-in-difference method to assess the severity of famine exposure and its correlation with donation tendencies. Our results show a significant association between famine exposure and an increased likelihood of making donations, with political trust identified as a key channel. These findings contribute to the broader understanding of how historical and personal experiences shape philanthropic behavior, emphasizing the need for models of donor behavior that incorporate the lasting effects of traumatic events. This research not only provides valuable insights into the motivations behind individual donations but also highlights the importance of considering life course perspectives in the study of charitable donation behavior. By integrating historical trauma into our analysis, we offer a comprehensive view of the factors driving philanthropic actions, underscoring the enduring impact of early life experiences on charitable giving.

The rational choice assumption is already disputable at the individual level of decisionmaking. At the level of collective decision-making unitary rational action is an unrealistic assumption. It neglects the transitivity of collective preferences issue, the logic of collective action and freeriding, the agency problem, and the human tendency to agree with each other irrespective of the facts. While unitary rational action is rejected as a basis for theorizing on international relations and war, the idea of decision-making under constraints seems as valid in the interstate context as in economics. The most important constraints on national security decision-making are the anarchical character of the international system and the corresponding need for self-help, the security and the territorial delimitation dilemmas, the presence or absence of plausible blueprints for victory, and the presence or absence of domestic constraints on bellicosity. A simple explanatory model of war built on these ideas is suggested and tested with dyadic data for the 1962–1980 period. In addition, there is some discussion of why collective security is doomed to fail, and why hegemony rather than balance improve the prospects of peace.

The weakening of enduring sources of partisanship, the rise of issue voting, and increased volatility in the electorates of many western countries during the 1970s and 1980s have renewed interest in party strategies. Both the proportions of voters switching parties and making up their minds late in the campaign have grown, and their growing numbers obviously have implications for the strategies of parties. Similarly, the erosion of partisan attachments and declining party membership give cause to reconsider the nature of party-voter linkages.

This article discusses two aspects of the interconnected social and economic features of voluntary associations. First, it characterises the transformation processes of voluntary associations which make them more similar to bureaucratic business organisations. The article's second endeavour is to discuss how changes in the economic features of an association have an impact on its social elements. The key argument is that changes in economic features of a voluntary association have important negative effects on its social basis. The analysis focuses on how changes in the mode of financing of an association affect the solidarity of its members.

In comparative politics, the political system of Switzerland is usually treated as an anomaly, or is passed over in silence. One might also suspect that political science in Switzerland itself enjoys a somewhat anomalous status. The present study is an attempt to characterize the peculiarities of the discipline, in terms both of its historical development and of its present state, along three lines of enquiry:

1. 1) a brief historical sketch, revealing just how much Swiss political science is still in its infancy;

2. 2) a survey of professorships and teaching programmes, showing the fairly modest part played by political science in Swiss universities;

3. 3) a description of the state of research in the field, indicating that the intellectual contribution of political scientists is growing both in quantity and in quality, is attracting more and more attention, but is also the source of increasing controversy.

In this article an integrated framework of agenda‐setting is proposed that incorporates the two main accounts of agenda‐setting: the information‐processing approach by Comparative Agenda Project scholars and the preference‐centred account advanced by Comparative Manifestoes Project scholars. The study claims that attention allocation is determined at the same time by preferences, information and institutions, and that attention allocation is affected by the interactions between these three factors. An empirical test is conducted that draws upon a dataset of parliamentary questions/interpellations in Belgium in the period 1993–2000. It is found that attention in parliament is indeed driven by preceding party manifestos (preferences), by available information (media coverage) and by institutional position (government or opposition party). The evidence establishes that agenda‐setting is also affected by the interactions between preferences, information and institutions. Actors, given their preferences, treat information in a biased fashion, and institutions moderate information's role.

The study investigates the affordances of email newsletters as perceived by the general public subscribers of non-profit organizations’ e-newsletters, through analyzing over 17,000 survey responses. An affordance lens acknowledges the possibility of multiple courses of action and forms of engagement in relation to the technology. Findings reveal that email newsletters may be more useful in terms of relationship cultivation than has been generally recognized, but also that perceptions of email affordances varied considerably between segments of the non-profit sector. While finding no strong links between e-newsletter receipt and volunteering or donation activity, the usefulness of email newsletters in terms of building connection between organization and recipient was confirmed at a moderate level. While illuminating the range of affordances offered by email, which has been largely overlooked in the literature, this study also suggests a number of implications for organizations in the non-profit sector.

This article outlines and discusses the bibliometric indicator used for performance-based funding of research institutions in Norway. It is argued that the indicator is novel and innovative as compared to the indicators used in other funding models. It compares institutions based on all their publication-based research activities across all disciplines. Specific incentives are given to researchers to focus their publication behaviour on the most ‘prestigious’ publication channels within the different fields. Such aims necessitate a documentation system based on high-quality data, and require differentiated publication counts as the basic measure. Experience until now suggests that the indicator works as intended.

This article discusses the extent to which it is possible to label European integration as a new critical juncture of politics in Central Europe by using four Central European countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as the focus of our investigation. The article presents the historical critical junctures of Central European efforts to liberalise and democratise politics and to create liberal democratic political institutions: the Revolution of 1848, the emergence of independent states in 1918, the Sovietisation of Central Europe between 1945–48 and democratic transition after 1989. We argue that after 2004, when the Central European countries entered the European Union (EU), the claims related to the liberal democratic nature of the EU polity triggered nationalist and illiberal opposition. Therefore, the EU membership has provided a new critical juncture impacting the consolidation or destabilisation of liberal democratic patterns of government. The article further argues that path dependence on the previous critical junctures of Central European politics plays a role in the political development of these countries’ stance on European integration. The authors show that there has been a contradiction between nationalism and liberal concept of democracy since the mid-nineteenth century and that this contradiction manifests in critical junctures based on European integration too.

This article is concerned primarily with the relationship between academic ideas and the ‘real world’ of politics. Disciplinary histories often assume a one-way influence of ideas, that of the academy into political practice. This article reverses that relationship and explores the way in which real-world ideas about politics have the potential to influence the way in which the academy develops, and the kind of responses it might offer. The primary focus is upon England and the marketisation of higher education; it asks are we burning all our books? This article also raises broader questions about the relationship between academia and that which it observes, with specific reference to political science.