This article argues that European doctoral programmes in political science should have three main aspirations. First, students must master the cutting edge research literature, and thus should get the high-level training that they need in both theory and methodology. Second, programmes should expose students to multidisciplinary influences and strong skills of critical analysis, so that they may see further than the current generation. Finally, in order to reproduce the profession, students must be taught to become excellent teachers.

We investigate the role of two possible sets of factors, cognitive and social, in modulating an individual's linguistic context-sensitivity: the capacity of a neurocognitive system to identify information in a communicative context that satisfies the meaning requirements of a given expression in that context. We assess whether the degree of contextual facilitation of an otherwise dispreferred reading of an English have-sentence is correlated with domain-general cognitive factors—by using the AUTISM-SPECTRUM QUOTIENT (AQ) to index an individual's ‘autistic-like’ traits—and/or with social factors associated with gender expression—by using participants' gender group.

Acceptability ratings (n = 271) for a dispreferred but plausible locative reading were significantly higher only after the facilitatory context, suggesting that relevant context can modulate the acceptability of different readings of a have-sentence. Crucially, the degree of facilitation correlates with participants' AQ scores, but not gender group, directly implicating cognitive variability in linguistic context-sensitivity differences, and leaving open the question of individual-level variability arising from social factors. Our findings are consistent with a model of language variation in which individuals with certain cognitive styles implement their grammatical knowledge at a larger ‘communicative scope’ than others, thereby inducing novel usage patterns of existing variants in their speech community.

Research concerning executive compensation has a long history. However, most studies have been conducted on publicly traded investor-owned enterprises. Although the not-for-profit sector experienced explosive growth during the 1990s, little work has been devoted to understanding its executive compensation schemes and incentives arrangements. In the United States, recent Federal and State legislation has changed the landscape under which nonprofits must operate to avoid penalties for paying excessive compensation to its executives. Studies of compensation schemes under different organizational arrangements are limited. This paper uses the U.S. hospital industry to link the for-profit and nonprofit compensation and incentive literatures. It highlights selected for-profit executive compensation and incentive processes and suggests how some of these methods could be applied in a nonprofit setting.

This article analyses a case involving the dismissal of a tenured faculty member at Hiroshima City University of Japan. The university dismissed a Korean woman associate professor after filing a criminal complaint against her, leading to a house raid, her arrest and media coverage. After 11 days of detention, the Hiroshima Prosecutor’s Office decided not to indict her because they could not find criminal intent on her part. With the suspicion of the university’s fabrication of her criminality looming large, she was dismissed within a few hours of her release. The university’s attempt to purge a critical foreign faculty member from the university campus, faculty housing and the country of Japan was an almost complete success until the case became an international controversy with counter-media exposure and the formation of a transnational support network. This case reveals a volatile mixture of race- and gender-based discrimination, administrative incompetence and politicised financial subsidy as a backdrop to violations of human rights and academic freedom. The present article shows that the rights’ violations in this case are closely connected to rising nationalism, the politicisation of educational subsidy and ideological human agencies with a set of professional agendas.

In this article, we present the Pangloss Collection, a collection of digital corpora of (mostly) endangered or underdocumented languages, developed in France since the 1990s in the context of a global realization of the considerable potential of digital technologies. The Pangloss Collection currently hosts 1,180 hours of audio and video recordings of about 200 languages. These materials are archived for the long-term using a suite of French public services for digital humanities. The Pangloss Collection can be freely accessed through a bilingual English-French website that was reshaped in 2021 to offer a general-audience interface mode and a professional interface mode (see https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/).

Research on interest groups has evolved from a focus on small-N studies to larger-N studies in the past 15 years. While both European and American research has become more sophisticated and aware of methodological aspects, there is yet no specialized literature on methods regarding how to study interest groups. Only few studies discuss the methodological implications of interest group studies, as well as the transferability of methods employed in other areas of political science to this research area. The contributions in this symposium focus on major problems and topics in interest group research and elaborate methods to deal with them: (1) the identification of the relevant interest group population, (2) the analysis of interest group strategies such as access, (3) the identification of interest groups positions and frames, and (4) the measurement of interest group success and influence. The introduction outlines these research problems and describes how the contributions to this symposium address them. The aim of the symposium is to increase awareness of the intricacies of these research problems, outline suitable practices to handle them, and stimulate debate on these methodological aspects.

This article examines civic and political engagement in contemporary China by three recent cases where activists and citizens take full advantage of interactive information technologies and Web 2.0 tools to overcome obstacles and mobilize for public goods. The cases show how activists act strategically to mobilize mass-based support and use various technologies to ensure monetary transaction, resource allocation, public monitoring, and large-scale inter-organizational coordination. In addition, they also demonstrate how ordinary Chinese citizens take part in innovative civic initiatives, act upon their own decisions, and eventually contribute to the change of a failed policy and the solution to a public problem. Different forms of online mass political engagement have introduced new dynamism to public affairs in China, enhanced social autonomy, and thus can have accumulative impact on the asymmetric power relationship between the authoritarian state and society.

Gender and politics research faces a crossroad in the age of populism. On the one hand, gender and sexuality research is on the way to institutionalisation across a growing number of academic systems in Europe. On the other, gender and sexuality research has become increasingly contested and attacked, and has become the bête noire of the populist and radical right. This contribution contends that gender research is under threat not only because of the gender component, but also because of the scholarly research. There are thus lessons to be drawn for the wider discipline of political science. This article first sketches out the dualization in the institutionalization of gender-related research. It then situates the hostility towards gender and sexuality research in the broader (and growing) opposition to gender + and sexual + equality. It concludes with some preliminary observations about the how this hostility may be part of a wider contestation of academic expertise and scholarly knowledge that is being led, at least in part, by populist forces of all stripes.

The failure of the Green parties at recent elections in Sweden and Germany makes it necessary to consider the future of ‘new politics’ in each country. With reference to modern organisation theory, the goal of this article is to explain the different character of the Green parties in both countries in terms of external political resources. Above all the features of new social movements on the one hand and the different party systems on the other are of particular importance. It is argued that both factors have an impact on the cleavage structure and social change in Sweden and Germany, as well as being important for the organizational survival of Green parties in both countries. The conclusion is that ‘new politics’ and the Greens have a more promising future in Germany than in Sweden.

Historical circumstances and available data sources have determined in large part the measurement strategies and specific estimates for individual components associated with the independent sector. The research programme at the Independent Sector (IS) started with the obvious advantage that other qualified researchers had conducted initial studies and published their findings about different aspects of the non-profit sector (Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, 1977). This helped us tremendously in our efforts to transform and make a mass of somewhat disparate data into a coherent, if not precise, description of the dimensions of the independent sector. In developing our programmes, we have relied on published and unpublished statistics and programmes of the US Government, those of private organisations, IS-commissioned surveys and in-house studies. Without significant contributions from each of these sources, our knowledge and understanding of the independent sector would be more circumscribed, and our estimates more aggregate and probably less precise than they are at present.

A push to reverse unsustainable trends has come from environmental civil society, but its track record is somewhat inconsistent. Why are some environmental organizations able to enhance the environmental cause, while others fail to create a substantial impact in the move toward environmental sustainability? This paper considers related but disparate clusters of literature and identifies factors that have an impact on the effectiveness of civil society. It also addresses the ambiguity that is attached to civil society—a concept with considerable historical baggage and contextual differentiation. Given that each conceptualization of civil society has its own body of literature and that these do not necessarily speak to each other, we propose an analytical framework that integrates a variety of dimensions relevant to the analysis of environmental civil society organizations (CSOs): the degree of institutionalization, the mode of interaction with the state, sources of funding, the locus of mobilization, the choice of issue(s), and the degree of politicization. Using these organizational characteristics, our framework further integrates contextual factors, constructing a multidimensional space where there are opportunities and constraints for environmental CSOs. This framework allows us to examine diverse paths shaped by context-dependent strategic choices of environmental CSOs which may either limit or enhance their capacity to make an impact. These strategic choices are tracked by selecting entry points inspired by fieldwork conducted in Turkey—specifically, institutionalization, the choice of issue(s), and politicization.

The growing prominence of patient and public involvement in health services has led to the increased use of experiential knowledge alongside medical and professional knowledge bases. Third sector organisations, which position themselves as representatives of collective patient groups, have established channels to communicate experiential knowledge to health services. However, organisations may interpret and communicate experiential knowledge in different ways, and due to a lack of inherent authority, it can be dismissed by health professionals. Thus, drawing on individual interviews with organisation representatives, we explore the definitions and uses of as well as the ‘filters’ placed upon experiential knowledge. The analysis suggests that whilst experiential knowledge is seen as all-encompassing, practical and transformative, the organisations need to engage in actions that can tame experiential knowledge and try to balance between ensuring that the critical and authentic elements of experiential knowledge were not lost whilst retaining a position as collaborators in health care development processes.

Alongside the ongoing renewal process of the Finnish welfare state, the role of the citizens is also revisited. So far the attention has mainly focused on how the responsibility for service provision is shared between the public sector and the service users, while the role of public services as a part of the democratic system has been more or less ignored. Based on the results from a 3-year participatory action research project called KAMPA, this article will discuss if the development of co-production in the context of public welfare services shows the way forward toward a new kind of society where democracy is an inseparable part of the structures and procedures of the service provision. The data gathered during the project (textual material, interviews, notes from meetings, and observation diaries) are analyzed using thematic analysis. The results show that while legislation and official policies strongly highlight the participation of citizens and service users, there are still many obstacles to overcome at both the attitudinal and practical level. The development of co-production and arenas of a new kind of democracy requires continuity in the attempts and recognition of the achievements, but it also has the potential to demonstrate the way in which a new more lively democratic society can come true in practice.

This article is concerned with the relationship between systemic and ideological changes affecting West European broadcasting and the nature of the regulatory responses. In theoretical terms the research interest Lies in the question of the extent to which changes in the nature of West European broadcasting regulation are determined by technological factors and forces in the international political economy. Particular attention is given to the factors impeding or constraining deregulation and to the argument that national institutional structures and traditions are mediating the impacts of technology, markets and ideology. Whilst the ultimate effects on future broadcasting regulation remain controversial, certain broad trends can be identified.