Democratic innovation is one way the multiple crises of democracy can be addressed. The literature on democratic innovation has yet to adequately interrogate the role of social movements, and more specifically the movement of democratic imaginaries, in innovation, nor has it considered the specific mechanisms through which movements translate democratic imaginaries and practices into innovation. This article provides a preliminary roadmap for methodological and conceptual innovation in our understanding of the role of social movements in democratic innovation. It introduces the concept of democratic innovation repertoires and argues that: a) we need to broaden our conceptualization and analysis of democratic innovation to encompass the role of social movements; and b) we need to understand how the relationship between democratic movement imaginaries and the praxis that movements develop in their quest to “save” or strengthen democracy can shape democratic innovation beyond movement arenas after mobilizing “events” have passed.

‘Pantha rhei,’ was one of the tenets of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. This observation on life in Greece in the sixth century BC is certainly relevant to the World Wide Web some 2,500 years later. On the Web everything is in a state of flux and is subject to continuous change. The Web is expanding at an enormous pace; millions of new pages appear every month. The number of sites - the building blocks of the Web - is increasing by millions each year and may have amounted to 162 million in July 2002 (Internet Software Consortium, www.isc.org/ds/WWW-200207/index.html). This incredible expansion is taking place despite the fact that at the same time as new sites are created, many disappear: the aveage life span of a site is estimated at seventy-five days. Sites are often provided at only one location. If, for whatever reason, a supplier decides to discontinue a site, it is lost forever. In this dynamic process of rise and fall most existing sites are not static either.

We question the commonly accepted assumption that American Sign Language (ASL) has no overt copula. We present evidence that one of the functions of the sign Self in present-day ASL is as a copula. This sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the ‘copula cycle’ (Katz 1996). The copula cycle consists of a deictic item transforming into a demonstrative pronoun and then into a copula by means of a series of syntactic reanalyses. We present corpus evidence from Old French Sign Language (LSF) in the 1850s, Old ASL in the 1910s, and present-day ASL dating to the 2000s and the late 2010s, and with these data analyze ASL examples of syntactic structures outlined by Li and Thompson (1977) that led to the increased use of Self as a copula. We also find that Self, which is not generally regarded as a pointing sign, follows the grammaticalization scheme for pointing signs outlined by Pfau and Steinbach (2006), indicating that the scheme may be used for signs that are derived from demonstratives. Ultimately, we conclude that ASL undergoes the same grammaticalization processes as spoken languages.

This article analyzes contemporary democracies from a deliberative democratic standpoint and focuses on the connection between public and empowered spaces. The idea of deliberative systems and the concept of “transmission” are introduced to discuss the ways in which the public is able to affect the empowered spaces. While elections perform important democratic functions, alone they cannot provide a good quality means for connecting deliberation in the public to that of actors in the empowered space. The problem with transmission is exacerbated to the extent that alternative forms of participation are neglected. The limited ability of the public to affect the empowered space in deliberative and democratic ways contributes to the crisis of democratic systems. One solution to this problem is to acknowledge the role of citizens' deliberation. The article argues for the systematic introduction of spaces for citizens' deliberation that would parallel existing decision-making.

This paper explores one aspect of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas on Legitimation Crisis. It focuses attention on Habermas's claim that the pre-capitalist moral values on which capitalism has hitherto relied have become progressively displaced by the growth of the capitalist economy. This has produced central problems for the state management of the economy, in the absence of an established internalized set of values which could act both as restraints upon economic demands and as reinforcements to an ethic of work. Various attempts to solve this problem proposed by Hayek and Luhman are discussed together with Habermas's own proposal for a rational consensus view of morality which could lead to a new Sittlichkeit. The conclusion of the paper is that while rational discussion of values is important, this does not entail that the possibility agreement is required to make sense of this activity. Habermas's notion of undistorted communication as a way of recommending a moral foundation for politics is not feasible.

The invitation that I received to deliver the 1993 Stein Rokkan Lecture during the Joint Sessions of Workshops at the University of Leiden gave me the welcome opportunity, in the introductory remarks of my lecture, to honour the memory of the late Stein Rokkan and to pay tribute to his many scholarly contributions. But perhaps more than anything else, I said, he deserves to be honoured for his work as one of the Founding Fathers of the European Consortium for Political Research. The Consortium is one of the greatest success stories in the social sciences: it has created a high-quality and truly European political science out of the formerly disparate national political sciences in the different West European countries in an incredibly short time span.

Analysing transatlantic relations from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP) to the 2009 Copenhagen accord, the article identifies underlying explanations for the divergences between the EU and US during international climate negotiations. It traces how a climate divide opened between the EU and the US in the early 2000s, involving confrontation over the implementation of the KP. However, a phase of EU–US rapprochement closed the climate gap in the late 2000s, leading to common positions during the 2009 COP-15 negotiations. Yet the Copenhagen Accord served to reinforce American influence, while undermining the coherence and credibility of the European stance. This led to multiple rifts in the post-Copenhagen landscape concerning climate treaty architecture, policy implementation and international relationships, jeopardising the success of future negotiations.

The analysis of similarities does not involve meaningless description but rather the more systematic use of Most Different Systems Designs, temporal variation and large-scale comparative designs. Parallel to this the quantification of comparative politics should progress further. Congruence analysis between data and competing theories can be a (or the) solution with N=1, but cannot be applied in settings with N>1 without risks of selection bias and limitations to multiple causation.

This article discusses some potentially harmful consequences of the Big Society agenda for small voluntary organisations, using a theoretical framework suggested by the later work of Pierre Bourdieu. I explore the way in which a voluntary self-help group for people with heart disease evolved, as a result of the pursuit of external funding. This paper focuses on the rapid rise of specific kinds of leaders—members with a professional background, relevant skills and an orientation to the group that enabled them to pursue funding opportunities and to gain increasing control despite the opposition of the long-standing volunteers and the founders of the group. I conclude that government policy to enhance the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery of welfare services may encourage certain kinds of leaders to become powerful in small voluntary organisations. This may adversely affect their organisational structure and lead members to feel dispossessed.

Countries vary substantially in the level of political patronage exercised in their respective political systems. This article examines how hypotheses generated by the literature on economic, institutional‐partisan and electoral factors account for variation in the level of political patronage in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Political patronage – operationalized as the proportion of spending on personnel to total spending, both at the central government and ministerial levels – is examined through a pooled cross‐sectional time‐series regression. Previous spending on personnel has the most consistent effect on political patronage, while the influence of political variables is more ambiguous. In contrast to conjectures that tie personalism and clientelism, it is shown that the presence of personalist parties in the legislature is negatively associated with patronage spending. Subsequently, the evolution of personnel expenditure in Argentina and Peru is traced, based on qualitative evidence and interview data.

Election studies are an important data pillar in political and social science, as most political research investigations involve secondary use of existing datasets. Researchers depend on high-quality data because data quality determines the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from statistical analyses. We outline data reuse quality criteria pertaining to data accessibility, metadata provision, and data documentation using the FAIR Principles of research data management as a framework (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). We then investigate the extent to which a selection of election studies fulfils these criteria using studies from Western democracies. Our results reveal that although most election studies are easily accessible and well documented and that the overall level of data processing is satisfactory, some important deficits remain. Further analyses of technical documentation indicate that while a majority of election studies provide the necessary documents, there is still room for improvement.

A central explanation of fiscal performance focuses on the structure of the cabinet. However, the partisan context of cabinet decisions remains under‐explored, the findings are based on small samples and the variables of interest are often poorly operationalised. Using a new dataset of spending ministers and partisan fragmentation in the cabinets of 58 countries between 1975 and 1998, this study finds a strong positive association between the number of spending ministers and budget deficits and expenditures, as well as weaker evidence that these effects increase with partisan fragmentation.

Frequent government crisis and high legislative output have distinguished Italy for over forty years. Previous explanations of the Italian legislative process have focused on the institutions established since the Second World War. In particular, the ability of the parliamentary committees to pass legislation, and the ‘polarized’ nature of the Italian party system have received a great deal of attention. This type of structural analysis has proved unable to successfully explain the significant variations in legislative output which have occurred since the early 1950s. This paper attempts to add to previous structural models by demonstrating that much of the variation which has occurred can be linked to the number of parties participating in the governing coalition. Furthermore, the paper questions previous interpretations of leggine (small laws) and the role they play within the legislative process by demonstrating their positive relationship to regular legislation.

Inspired by “extra-market” initiatives to ensure media diversity in social-democratic Northern Europe, the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) is a path-breaking attempt by a developing country to support the media needs of marginalized communities too poor to be of interest to advertising-driven commercial media. This paper examines the policy process towards the establishment of the MDDA as a partnership between the state, capital, and civil society within the constraints of South Africa’s re-entry into a global economy that privileges “free market” solutions to developmental problems. Under these conditions, do partnerships between the state, the private sector, and civil society facilitate or hinder the achievement of social objectives aimed primarily at uplifting the poor and marginalized?.