The calls for NGO accountability have grown louder in recent years, some based on genuine concerns to help improve their performance and others on a desire to muffle their advocacy activities. Using a comprehensive analytical framework, this article finds that current accountability approaches prioritize accountability to boards and donors and give weak accountability to communities despite strong NGO rhetoric to the contrary. The article recommends the development of accountability mechanisms managed by NGO coordination bodies and focused primarily on accountability to communities to improve NGO performance and protect them from politically motivated attacks.

This study seeks to go beyond the current dichotomous evaluation of the effects of foreign financial patronage (and particularly European funds) in the post-communist civil society. A longitudinal claim-making and micro-frame analysis (1992–2012) of Czech Romani/pro-Romani activists shows that with the influx of European funds there was no significant change in NGOs action repertoire toward protest and contentious collective action as some proponents of the channeling thesis assume. On the other hand, the funding did not bring about the (often mentioned) co-optation and de-mobilization either. Particularly, Romani NGOs did not use protest tactics even before the arrival of foreign patronage, while other types of actors—especially in the informal, grassroots segment of civil society—protested both before and after this funding appeared. Nevertheless, what changed with the arrival of European funds was the discursive repertoire of the Romani and pro-Romani activists. The study concludes that the impacts of European funding also vary according to different civil society sectors and the picture of the impact of funding on post-communist society, in this case in the Czech Republic, is more diversified than previously assumed.

Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear problematic of “inequality in volunteering.” Compared to the guiding question of “participation,” the concept of “inequality” can generate a more variegated, critical, and change-oriented research agenda. With this special issue, we aim to build a “new research front” in the field of volunteering. In this introduction, we advance a novel research agenda structured around a multidimensional understanding of inequality, concomitantly delineating four central research programs focusing on (a) resources, (b) interactions, (c) governmentalities, and (d) epistemologies. We discuss the focus of these lines of research in greater detail with respect to inequality in volunteering, their main critique of dominant research on participation in volunteering, and key elements of the new research agenda.

There is widespread agreement that both tiers of a mixed-member electoral system do not operate independently of one another and that instead they interact, producing contamination effects. These tend to raise the number of parties away from what Duverger’s Law or the M + 1 rule suggest. However, the field has not yet determined an undisputed methodological approach to answer the following question: raised by how much, exactly? This paper identifies and differentiates amongst three major measurement techniques, herein titled the Difference Approach, the Likeness Approach, and the Simulation Approach. By doing so, it provides a more concise map of each of their logics, their varied implementations, their drawbacks, as well as possible ways forward.

This article addresses the issue of whether a model of deep European integration might be envisaged in a continent-wide process that might accompany eastern enlargement of the European Union. The paper argues that deep integration in Western Europe has been built on three dimensions: the functional; the territorial; and affiliational. The articulation of these three dimensions has evolved through not only the EU, but also a dense pattern of other transnational linkages, including those between immediate neighbours. Moreover, different west European countries have been linked into this process through varied patterns for ‘domesticating’ Europe. Efforts to develop an EU polity require the interplay of all three dimensions of integration, a tough goal for post-cold-war Europe in the western part of the continent, let alone in ‘pan-Europe’.

What factors contribute to the small state experience in economic bad times? What tools do they have to respond? What are particular small state issues in these circumstances? Does EU membership matter to small states (does it expose them to a harsher crisis; and/or restrict their options to deal with the crisis)? What is the role of trade, economic activity, EU governance and regulation, as well as the EU response to the crisis? How does being a member of the euro area differ from being outside the euro area? I review the economic experience of euro area countries, countries outside the euro area and some non-EU countries. This study shows that small states have different ways to deal with the crisis. There does not seem to be one major lesson to be learnt about the way in which they cope.

The traditional class approach to politics maintains that the working class ‘naturally’ votes for left‐wing parties because they represent its economic interests. Such traditional voting patterns have, however, become less typical, giving rise to the ‘Death of Class Debate’ in political sociology. Against this background, using data collected in the Netherlands in 1997, this article examines why so many people, working and middle class alike, vote for parties that do not represent their ‘real class interests’. Critically elaborating Lipset's work on working‐class authoritarianism and Inglehart's on postmaterialism, the article confirms that ‘natural’ voting complies with the logic of class analysis. ‘Unnatural’ voting, however, is not driven by economic cues and class. Right‐wing working‐class voting behaviour is caused by cultural conservatism that stems from limited cultural capital. The pattern of voting for the two small leftist parties in Dutch politics underscores the significance of this cultural explanation: those with limited cultural capital and culturally conservative values vote for the Socialist Party (‘Old Left’) rather than the Greens (‘New Left’). Breaking the traditional monopoly of the one‐sided class approach and using a more eclectic and open theoretical approach enables political sociologists once again to appreciate the explanatory power of the class perspective.

In recent decades, biblical and early Christian studies have become more keenly aware and critical of how ancient Mediterranean literature perpetuates patriarchal stereotypes about women, incites gendered violence, and often participates in a culture of blaming women for the perpetuation of such stereotypes and violence. This article examines how the soul is gendered and made a victim of sexual violence in a Nag Hammadi text known as the Exegesis on the Soul (Exeg. Soul). After introducing Exeg. Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II, I examine how the text participates in victim blaming and in conversation with recent advances in classical and biblical scholarship, as well as key differences between Exeg. Soul and other texts in Codex II regarding their characterization of sexual violence. I argue that despite its usefulness in encouraging ascetics to resist desires and repent like the soul portrayed in the text, Exeg. Soul offers a less forgiving portrayal of divine intervention (or lack thereof) in moments of sexual violence and risks the revictimization of survivors.

This article focuses on the role of congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition-and-selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, I illustrate how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they PREEXIST and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this article by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in twenty contact languages across nineteen grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, I propose a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.

A number of the basic assumptions made by economic theories of democracy are tested by means of a general model of the formation of citizens’ attitudes towards changes in public spending. The test is performed on Danish individual-level data in combination with city-level data. The results generally confirm the validity of some of the assumptions of economic theories of democracy: that people have some knowledge of public policies, that they react accordingly, and that some sort of cost benefit calculus is at work because attitudes to some extent are a function of individual self-interest. On the other hand, the model also points towards mechanisms which are indicative of the limitations of narrow self-interest-oriented economic reasoning because people's ideologies seem to be more important than self-interest measures.

One can hardly conceive of a theory of representative democracy-normative or positive-which is not based on specific assumption about the relationship between public policies and voter attitudes. This relationship is a two-way relationship. On the one hand, voter attitudes are assumed to influence public policies either through the voting process or through more direct processes such as, for example, organized pressure. Second, public policies are assumed to affect voter attitudes. If, for instance, public policies change in a direction favoured by voters, it is expected that voters become more satisfied.

The purpose of this article is to test the latter relation. The proposition to be tested is:

The test is based on individual level data and on aggregated measures of local spending, service levels and taxation. In order to perform the test a general model explaining voter attitudes will be formulated. The model comprises four major explanatory categories: public policies, private benefit indicators, ideology and political culture indicators.

The U.S. and the U.K. are considered as successful models of social enterprise. The Korean government benchmarked these two models in the hope of achieving similar success, without much avail. The growth of social enterprises in South Korea is attributed to the country’s characteristically strong central government and its creation of relevant institutions and provision of support services. However, this paper provides an alternate explanation by highlighting role of the third sector as the ‘policy entrepreneur’ in agenda-setting and policy implementation with regards to social enterprises in South Korea. Additionally, the decentralized local governments as well as the market structure dominated by big businesses are also examined as the main contributors to ‘policy windows’ for the third sector’s policy entrepreneurship. The paper showcases successful development of social enterprise despite the absence of a welfare state or a well-developed third sector, and argues that the phenomenon should hold numerous policy implications for other Asian countries.

Many studies show that policy makers react to the policy choices made in other jurisdictions, but we still know relatively little about the factors driving interdependent policy making, especially about how context shapes interdependence. Theoretical arguments suggest that contextual factors, such as stable institutions and geographic location, explain variation in interdependence. However, there is a lack of empirical research investigating contextual heterogeneity in interdependent policy making, mainly because it cannot be analysed with standard spatial econometric methods. This article introduces multilevel modeling that allows the study of contextual variation in interdependence and illustrates the method with the analysis of uneven tax competition in Switzerland. The findings of fine‐grained data show that cantonal governments compete more strongly with their competitors the closer a unit is located to a metropolis with comprehensive public good provision. The analysis demonstrates that we can better understand the mechanisms of interdependent policy making by studying its contextual drivers.