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.

In spite of a large number of disagreements concerning methodological and classificatory questions between Klaus Armingeon and myself, our substantive conclusions are very similar. Armingeon concludes that all three aspects of his negotiation democracy (consociationalism, corporatism, and counter-majoritarian institutions) result in superior government performance in selected areas – a finding that I interpret as supportive of my similar claims for the executives-parties dimension of consensus democracy (which consists of consociationalism plus corporatism) as well as for the federal-unitary dimension (which is the same as Armingeon's counter-majoritarian institutions). We are therefore also in broad agreement on the advice we can give to democratic constitutional engineers.

The past two decades have witnessed massive growth in the amount of quantitative research in nonprofit studies. Despite the large number of studies, findings from these studies have not always been consistent and cumulative. The diverse and competing findings constitute a barrier to offering clear, coherent knowledge for both research and practice. To further advance nonprofit studies, some have called for meta-analysis to synthesize inconsistent findings. Although meta-analysis has been increasingly used in nonprofit studies in the past decade, many researchers are still not familiar with the method. This article thus introduces meta-analysis to nonprofit scholars and, through an example demonstration, provides general guidelines for nonprofit scholars with background in statistical methods to conduct meta-analyses, with a focus on various judgement calls throughout the research process. This article could help nonprofit scholars who are interested in using meta-analysis to address some unsolved research questions in the nonprofit literature.

The Ottoman-Safavid war of 1578–1590 marked the first time the Caucasus emerged as a primary battleground in the struggle between the Ottomans, Iran, and Russia. The war’s first campaign, led by Lala Muṣṭafā Paşa in Shirvan, also saw the rise of Özdemiroġlu ʿOs̱mān Paşa, commander of the Ottoman troops that wintered in Daghestan in 1578–1579. This campaign has been extensively recounted in contemporary chronicles, particularly in ġazavātnāme such as Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s Nuṣretnāme (c. 1584) and Āṣafī Dāl Meḥmed Çelebi’s Şecāʿatnāme (c. 1586–1587), both authored by high-ranking officials who took part in the campaign. However, a different perspective emerges when one considers the experiences of rank-and-file soldiers, voiceless yet central actors in the events chronicled in these narratives. This study focuses on the so-called Tārīḫ-i ʿOs̱mān Paşa, a war memoir composed in Turkish between 1580–1584 by Ebūbekir b. ʿAbdullāh, a cavalryman in the Ottoman army.

In addition to adopting a more prosaic tone than his prestigious contemporaries, Ebūbekir also gives prominence to his personal experiences and observations, particularly when recounting his one-year stay in the region of Derbent. In this passage, he describes the peoples of Daghestan and briefly discusses their history, sociopolitical organization, beliefs, and customs. In this article, I present a translation and analysis of this passage of the book. In introducing this text to an English-speaking audience, this work contributes to our historical understanding of Daghestan and the Caucasus and provides valuable material for studying Ottoman mentalities, moving beyond the authorized narratives of state-employed chroniclers.

In reinterrogating core concepts from his 2015 book, The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey explains the nature of emergent, evanescent, and contrarian forms of political practice. He sheds light on what is driving the political disruption transpiring now through a series of engaging comments from the field on well-known initiatives like Occupy, #15M, and Zapatistas and also lesser-known experiments such as the creation of new political parties like Castelló en Moviment, among others. Postrepresentative representation, it is argued, is not an oxymoron; it, like the term antipolitical politics, is rather a provocative concept designed to capture the radically new swarming politics underway in countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Iceland. Citizens are tooling up with ICTs, and this has led to resonant political movements like #15M in Spain or Occupy more broadly. Key takeaways from this interview include the double-edged nature of representation and the fact that new forms of political representation are breaking the mould.

In this research, we focus on the governance role of the coordinator affiliated to the leading agency in public–nonprofit service networks. We analyze the extent to which different types of coordinators are able to build consensus on a set of network goals in close collaboration with the nonprofit network partners. We explore three network cases, respectively, coordinated by a commissioner, a co-producer and a facilitator. Both network coordinators and respondents from participating nonprofit service agencies are interviewed.In contrast to earlier studies our analysis indicates that, in comparison with a facilitator, a commissioner and a co-producer are better equipped to reach consensus on a set of goals in service networks. The practice of synthesis is considered as very important when establishing consensus in a network.

Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.

Voluntary sector and non-profit studies require theoretical frameworks facilitating better understandings of what occurs on the ground. Following Lipsky’s (Street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual in public service, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1980) formulation of street-level bureaucracies, scholars have emphasized workplace hierarchies, reproducing dichotomous ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ conceptualizations of practice which can obscure the full complexity of practitioners’ workplace relationships. In this paper, we offer a thematic model of (collective) action that centres the ‘division of labour’ across, and relations between, professional niches that are differentiated by their ‘helping’ orientations, workplace tasks, and responsibilities to service users rather than their organizational status or salaries. We mobilize qualitative research undertaken in the penal voluntary sectors of Canada and England to highlight the mutually constitutive efforts of frontline and management work with criminalized service users. Drawing on and extending Alinsky’s ‘river dilemma’, we conceptualize practice in the (penal) voluntary sector as organized according to the differing choices practitioners make about whom to ‘help’ and how to intervene, which have consequences for social policy, service delivery, and advocacy work.

This article explains a dominant, curious and important pattern that emerges from our original data on 11 areas of financial regulation in the United States and the European Union from the Great Financial Crisis to 2020: sustained regulatory stringency in both jurisdictions. Our novel explanation, rooted in theories about international economic interdependence, temporal process and market power, emphasizes cross‐border interactions that arose from a build‐up of ‘border‐policing’ capacities. Our medium‐n study, which combines congruence analysis and process tracing, reveals a causal mechanism – ‘joint reinforcement’ – whereby the potential penalties imposed by one of the two jurisdictions prevent or temper the other from watering down‐regulation. The study pushes the boundaries of qualitative research, advances theory and speaks to debates about global public goods.

Joe Pater's (2019) target article calls for greater interaction between neural network research and linguistics. I expand on this call and show how such interaction can benefit both fields. Linguists can contribute to research on neural networks for language technologies by clearly delineating the linguistic capabilities that can be expected of such systems, and by constructing controlled experimental paradigms that can determine whether those desiderata have been met. In the other direction, neural networks can benefit the scientific study of language by providing infrastructure for modeling human sentence processing and for evaluating the necessity of particular innate constraints on language acquisition.

Despite the role that non-government organisations, including community development organisations, play in social transformation, their approach to managing projects has received little attention. Employing a processual approach and participatory methodology, this paper investigates how a small, distributed, community-based organisation negotiates the challenges associated with managing its geographically dispersed development projects. It examines lessons that this organisation’s project management approach offers for managing projects at a distance in ways that encourage community ownership, partnership with project beneficiaries and their maximum participation in the process. The paper underlines the need for positioning people’s participation in development projects as a key component of development, rather than as a tool for project implementation. It concludes by advocating a blend of participation and empowerment with technical assistance for recipient communities.

Neither on the level of interactions between organizations nor on the level of servicing users, co-production has a fixed meaning. It is argued that there are different meanings that unfold once one looks at the impact of narratives such as consumerism, managerialism, or participatory governance. Altogether with the traditions of state-welfare, they simultaneously influence the modes and meanings of co-production in personal services. Taking up the example of modern healthcare systems and its hallmarks in Germany, it is shown that, therefore, uncertainty and ambiguity is the normalcy rather than the exception when it comes to define co-production. Role-expectations such as the “expert–patient” or the “citizen–consumer” have a liberating potential, but may likewise marginalize issues such as trust and the need for protection. User organizations are well challenged beyond their role of helping users to cope as good as possible with given role models of co-production.