This article addresses the development and trend of thinking in terms of ‘civil-military relations’ towards ‘security sector governance’. The first section reviews political-military and civil-military relations theory from its beginnings to present. The next section examines the post-Cold War transformation of the principle of civilian control by taking into account i.e. its new relevance in international affairs. While the subsequent section briefly discusses the so-called ‘constructivist turn’ in civil-military relations theory, the paper concludes with an outlook related to the security-development nexus and its possible impact on civil-military relations.

The article analyses publication patterns according to gender in three Political Science and International Relations journals based in Britain (Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Review of International Studies). Examining publications from 1991 to 2011 in terms of authorship, seniority of author, and number of citations and responses, our findings suggest that women are less likely to be published as sole or lead author than their male counterparts are but that they are just as likely to be cited. Furthermore, since 2000, women are now over-represented in comparison with their presence within the discipline in publications that have at least one female author.

Viewing disability as a form of social capital, this paper examines the unique contribution of volunteers with disabilities and the meaning that volunteering holds for them. Of the 35 volunteers with disabilities interviewed, all were volunteering in self-help organizations for people with disabilities, half of them in administrative and leadership roles. The interviews revealed rich and active stories. Their areas of activity were diverse and encompassed various organizations. The volunteers crossed over from the role of merely extending services to their beneficiaries to becoming activists for political and social change. Their practices suggest that the volunteers’ self-identity as individuals with disabilities has shaped their supportive approach. Therefore, understanding their unique resources as people with disabilities is key to developing an organizational culture that promotes integrative recruitment of volunteers.

Signature pedagogies have been defined as ‘types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their profession’ (Schulman, 2005: 3). Applying Schulman's definition of signature pedagogies to political science, this article notes that as an academic discipline it does not seek to train students for a specific profession. It also recognises that political science's signature pedagogy is similar to those traditionally associated with the social sciences and humanities: mass lectures, small tutorials and private study. In recent times newer pedagogies such as problem-based learning, experiential learning and service learning have been introduced in political science programmes to marry theory and practice and promote critical thinking and independent learning. This article focuses on one such approach, service learning, assessing the contribution it can make to teaching in political science with reference to an analysis of its effects in a postgraduate module on democratic civic education in University College Cork, Ireland.

Although happy New Left radical may seem like an oxymoron, many veterans of the protest cycle of the late 1960s-early 1970s in Japan seem to find happiness through political participation in an alternative invisible civil society. Guided by actor-network theory and utilizing long-term participant observation data, the study finds that participants bring distinctive cultural capital to their political activism and use their specialized skills to organize events and produce material objects that explain and promote their ideas. They derive personal enjoyment and a sense of purpose from the creative activities of “making and doing” that characterize their autonomous participation in the invisible civil society, and simultaneously build networks rich in social capital. Their activities meet the criteria for experiencing well-being or happiness both through strong network relations (social capital theory), and engaging in activities with autonomous motivation (self-determination theory).

Language learners are often faced with a scenario where the data allow multiple generalizations, even though only one is actually correct. One promising solution to this problem is that children are equipped with helpful learning strategies that guide the types of generalizations made from the data. Two successful approaches in recent work for identifying these strategies have involved (i) expanding the set of informative data to include INDIRECT POSITIVE EVIDENCE, and (ii) using observable behavior as a target state for learning. We apply both of these ideas to the case study of English anaphoric one, using computationally modeled learners that assume one’s antecedent is the same syntactic category as one and form their generalizations based on realistic data. We demonstrate that a learner that is biased to include indirect positive evidence coming from other pronouns in English can generate eighteen-month-old looking-preference behavior. Interestingly, we find that the knowledge state responsible for this target behavior is a context- dependent representation for anaphoric one, rather than the adult representation, but this immature representation can suffice in many communicative contexts involving anaphoric one. More generally, these results suggest that children may be leveraging broader sets of data to make the syntactic generalizations leading to their observed behavior, rather than selectively restricting their input. We additionally discuss the components of the learning strategies capable of producing the observed behavior, including their possible origin and whether they may be useful for making other linguistic generalizations.

The study aimed to identify factors that explain general satisfaction with volunteering among volunteers in Operation Protective Edge, in Israel, through a comparison between organized volunteers affiliated with volunteer organizations and spontaneous volunteers who arrived at the scene independently. Based on the social exchange theory as the theoretical framework, the contribution of several variables to explaining general satisfaction with volunteering was examined: satisfaction with the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of volunteering, personal sacrifice in volunteering, and motives for volunteering (social solidarity, personal empowerment, and escape from reality). The findings revealed that among organized volunteers, satisfaction with the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of volunteering mediated between motives for volunteering and general satisfaction with volunteering. Among spontaneous volunteers, the motives of social solidarity and personal empowerment as well as satisfaction with intrinsic and extrinsic rewards were the main variables that explained general satisfaction with volunteering. In contradistinction, the main variables that explained general satisfaction with volunteering among organized volunteers were the motive of personal empowerment and satisfaction with the extrinsic rewards of volunteering.

The task of reviewing public policy research in Eastern Europe borders on the impossible. For one thing, public policy is an extremely broad field, and analysis might cover anything from the memos of government advisors to the manifestos of NGOs. Second, there is the problem of language. There are ten working languages for the ten candidate countries alone. Third, because members of the policy analyst ‘elite ‘ often work as consultants, the best East European public policy research usually comes out of projects run by assistance organisations, including the World Bank and the OECD. As such, their work tends to be contaminated (not necessarily in a bad sense) by the latest ideas and methodologies propounded by these organisations, and it becomes difficult to distinguish what is purely ‘Eastern’ from what is ‘Western’. The widespread complaint that the East was ‘intellectually colonised’ by the West after the fall of the Wall is clearly well founded in the case of public policy research.

Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, from which we randomly sampled 200 example sentences each. We find that the gender skew and stereotypes reported in 1997 are still present today. Male-gendered arguments are almost twice as frequent as female-gendered ones, and more likely to occur as subjects and agents. In addition, example sentences often perpetuate gender stereotypes. We discuss some broader implications and potential interventions to prevent the implicit perpetuation of gender biases in linguistic materials.

In recent years, countries around the world have pursued numerous in novations in political participation. The most common reforms, from a global perspective, have been provisions for the increasedrepresentationof women. Today, nearly all countries have pledged to promote gender-balanced decision-making (United Nations, 1995), and more than eighty have witnessed the adoption of quotas for the selection of female candidates. These provisions include reserved seats, which set aside a certain number of seats for women; political party quotas, which aim to increase the proportion of women among party candidates; and national legislative quotas, which require political parties to nominate a certain percentage of women among their candidates.

This paper examines the long-term grassroots empowerment strategies endorsed by non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) in Lima, Peru and their application in concrete development programmes. An examination of NGDO literature and projects permits the synthesis of three ideal-typical empowerment strategies (Neo-Marxist, Neo-Anarchist, Coalition-Building). These strategies are described and compared, especially with respect to their diverging conceptions on processes of ‘bottom-up’ development, the characterisation of grassroots mobilisation and the role of the state and political parties. These differences, however, tend to be compromised once actual advocacy work with the grassroots is contemplated, when development projects have to deal with the micro-mobilisation patterns of the poor and the political conjuncture. Several interpretations of the contradiction between ideal-typical strategies and actual advocacy tactics are discussed, concluding that such contradictions are inherent to any political process based on grassroots empowerment and a ‘bottom-up’ agenda.

This paper begins by identifying how, as a result of the confluence of a number of factors, civil organizations (COs) in Mexico have shown an exponential development in the past 15 years. However, it is argued that COs are suffering a fiscal crisis and, in some sense, an economic one, provoked by the political reaction of the government toward this growth. At the same time, there is no crisis of legitimacy; their increasing levels of social support suggests a trend in the reverse direction. However, the legitimacy attributable by the population to nonprofits seems to be due to the novelty of this sociopolitical actor in the context of a disappointment with more traditional ones including government and political parties—as opposed to an endorsement of their proven capacity or efficiency in solving the problems of development. To take advantage of what seems to be a golden opportunity for its positive development, in addition to changing the unfavorable economic environment, it is argued that the sector has to face the challenge of thinking in its long-term interest and making sure that it is positioned to act as capably efficient.

Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this article suggests that constitutional features do not play a prominent role. In order to establish this finding, this article (a) develops theory‐driven expectations as to the factors that are said to encourage blunders, (b) devises a systematic framework for the assessment of policy processes and outcomes, and (c) uses fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis to identify sets of causal conditions associated with particular outcomes (i.e., blunders). The article applies this novel approach to a set of particular policy domains, finding that constitutional features are not a contributory factor to blunders in contrast to instrument choice, administrative capacity and hyper‐excited politics.

According to many commentators, the end of the social democratic era is at hand. Changes in the social structure, the fading of collectivist ideas and institutions and internal contradictions within the social democratic project are among the many factors cited in its demise. The single most important, however, has probably been the emergence of a globalised world economy. The ‘strong globalisation’ thesis holds that the ‘social democratic era’, with its commitment to an elaborate, ambitious and universalistic welfare state funded by high, progressively levied taxes is unsustainable in the new globalised world economy. Some argue that the political acknowledgment of this incompatibility is evident in the Blair Governments decision to alter its ‘Third Way’ creed, shedding key tenets of traditional social democracy. The argument can be outlined in three steps.

The features of globalisation – the growing integration of national economic systems; the deregulation and liberalisation of trade, credit and currency movements; the massive expansion of financial markets; and the rise of the multinational firm - have produced a qualitative transformation of the international economy.

The new generation of student often seems to respond extremely well to the delivery of information in a much more visual medium. One response is for universities to make more use of freely available screen capture software. By marrying this technology with relatively new visual presentation tools like Prezi, VideoScribe and Powtoon, lecturers can create dynamic, short screencast videos on all aspects of teaching and learning. This approach to the provision of additional “on demand” learning has been adopted by small groups of colleagues across the UK Higher Education sector, but, in the Department of Politics at the University of Reading, there has been a very specific focus on creating discipline-specific screencast videos to support assessment literacy and a greater understanding of assessment processes at an undergraduate level. These screencast videos explored advanced essay writing skills, dissertation writing, marking criteria, Harvard and Oxford referencing as well as supporting assessment processes. View rates, user behaviour data and survey results suggest that developing short, visual, screencast videos encourages engagement with assessment support, improves satisfaction and can increase student perceptions of their assessment literacy proficiency.