This article, taking as its point of departure that voluntary organizations are of crucial importance in a democracy, views the transformation of the Norwegian voluntary sector through the lenses of what happens within the environmental field. Seeing changes within this field as prototypical for the transformation of the voluntary sector more generally, we start with the organizational level and contrast old versus new environmental organizations. The aim is to ascertain to what extent the newly built organizations are leaving the historically important democratic organizational model. Second, we compare attitudes toward democracy of members of the democratically and nondemocratically built organizations: attitudes both toward democracy within a voluntary organization (internal) and democracy in society (external). Furthermore, we compare these findings with what we find for the population at large. The last section analyzes demographic characteristics of organized environmentalists to see whether a new type of elite, more distanced from the population at large, is emerging in the new and nondemocratically built organizations. The study finds that new organizations are definitely breaking with the democratic organizational model. The support for democracy (internal and external) is comprehensive but not always overwhelming, and there is a tendency in the direction of congruence between organizational structure and individual attitudes. That is, members of democratically built organizations especially value internal but also to some extent external democracy more than members of nondemocratically built organizations. However, even if formal democratic structure and democracy as an absolute and generalized value seems to be under pressure, it does not follow that a new type of elitism is emerging.

While the impact of government interference to the religious domain has long been discussed in previous literature, empirical evidence on the nexus between government intervention to religion and individuals’ giving to religious organizations remains limited. In this study, we aim to fill this gap and examine whether government intervention affects individuals’ giving to faith-based charities. To this end, a survey data conducted in 20 European countries and two measures of government intervention to religion were used. Our empirical investigation based on multilevel logistic regression, after controlling for possible confounding factors at individual and country levels, indicates that government regulation of religion has a significant negative impact both on religious donation and volunteering. The findings of the present study add substantially to our understanding of nexus between government and religion and will serve as a base for future studies.

It is generally held that coups are the start of full military intervention. As a consequence, studies intent on contrasting the performance of ‘military’ as opposed to ‘civilian’ governments have used the event of a military coup as the essential criterion for distinction. The evidence clearly shows, however, that the distinction is not so easily drawn. Further, consideration of the only systematic attempt to delineate types of military regimes in respect of civilian involvement suggests that the dichotomised view of military and civilian regimes should be replaced by attention being drawn to power and force in all political systems. This view is supported by a classification of Third World political systems which reflects these two dimensions. Ironically, the study of military governments installed by coups d'état has actually served to obscure the importance of force in politics.

This article offers an exploration of the transmission of the Pericope Adulterae (PA) in medieval manuscripts through the reports of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egyptian scholars Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar and al-Asʿad ibn al-ʿAssāl. Ibn Kabar’s investigation reveals disparities between Arabic and Coptic sections, prompting a study of the PA’s presence in manuscripts across languages. Ibn al-ʿAssāl’s research involves examining manuscripts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac, uncovering the PA’s rarity rather than prevalence. Byzantine-text based Arabic translations are found to introduce the PA to Coptic and Syriac circles. In contrast, the Melkite tradition, reliant on Greek manuscripts, often omits the PA. By tracing these scholars’ inquiries, the article provides insights into the PA’s complex journey of presence and absence in medieval Egypt and the Levant.

Social movements provide a vital lens for assessing visions of the public good. Social movement (SM) theory explains the motives and structures of movement activity. Emerging in the 1960s, theories that remain relevant to this day include resource mobilization theory, framing, and political opportunity. Despite the prominence of these theories, several critiques of SM theory have emerged. Newer theories such as cognitive liberation and collective identity extend the scope of SM analysis and also focus on internal aspects of movement activity. Latin America, as one of the new sites of analysis, has received much attention from a wide range of SM theories. Yet, the Caribbean, in particular, the Anglophone Caribbean has received little attention. This paper will place both original and newer theories within the context of the Anglophone Caribbean. Specifically, SM theory will be applied to the Bahamian women’s suffrage movement of 1948–1967. The paper will also explain the historical roots of Bahamian culture as a way to explain movement activity and development.

This article takes issue with Steiner's polemic against the usage of ‘deliberation’ in rational choice scholarship. I show (i) that the reproach that rationalists do not allow for preference change is mistaken; (ii) that Steiner does not sufficiently distinguish between normative and positive contributions and (iii) that he shields his preferred model against systematic comparisons with strategic models of deliberation. In my view, we need more competing model evaluations rather than misleading attacks against imagined heretics.

This study examines Hispanic formal volunteering and the cultural, social, and community context factors that affect their decision to volunteer. Using data from three surveys in the United States, the study finds that religious attendance, cultural background, and education are the most consistent and significant predictors of Hispanic formal volunteering. Religious attendance has a stronger positive impact on Hispanic volunteering than on non-Hispanics. The impacts of income, social resources, and community characteristics on Hispanics’ volunteering vary by surveys. Secular organizations serving children and youth and religious organizations are the favorite organizations for Hispanic volunteers.

In political systems that do not require the legislator to have his residence in the constituency which elects him, a data matrix can be created by juxtaposing the two variables of constituency affiliation and residence affiliation of legislators. This geographical matrix of representation will display a characteristic pattern which can be rendered understandable by means of a simple axiomatic model of political recruitment The model is based upon the assumption that rational office-seekers and agents of selection will make their decisions with regard to nomination in such a way that the costs of communication between the representative and his constituency are minimized. This decisional premise is operationalized by means of the three spatial distances between residence, constituency, and the site of the legislature. From the triadic distance model a number of hypotheses are derived. These are tested by means of data on Danish legislators. As the model gains considerable support, the article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of refining and further testing the model.

This article investigates how globalization and organized labour condition partisan effects on different welfare state programs. The main argument is that the conditional effect of globalization on government partisanship depends on how relevant a program is to the needs of vulnerable groups and that organized labour additionally affects this relationship. Analyzing 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2011/2014, empirical evidence largely corroborates this argument: Firstly, the expectation that partisan differences decrease with globalization in general and especially in weak labour countries in the case of programs that are less relevant for compensation holds true for old‐age provision and partly for sick pay insurance. Secondly, and in accordance with theoretical expectations concerning programs that are primarily relevant for compensation, partisan differences increase with globalization, in general regarding education and only in strong labour countries regarding unemployment benefits. Therefore, while globalization constrains national politics’ room for manoeuvre in some areas, parties are still able to follow their ideologically preferred policies and respond to compensation demands in others.

This article examines the interaction between individual characteristics and institutional incentives in non–voting, with a special focus on the interaction between these two types of explanatory variables. The analysis of survey and contextual data for parliamentary elections in 15 Western European countries shows that the effect of individual resources and motivations on abstention is not constant across different countries. Conversely, the effect of institutional incentives (compulsory voting, voting facilities, electoral thresholds of representation and preference expression) on non–voting depends on the elector's level of resources and motivations. One of the four institutional incentives considered has even opposite effects for citizens with different individual characteristics. The analysis also shows that when analysing interactions it is fundamental to distinguish between magnitudes and consequences of the effects of explanatory variables. This has important implications for the interpretation of the results of logistic regression analysis.

The article purports, first, to review briefly the evolution of conference diplomacy from the age of the Congress of Vienna until the era of the United Nations. Building upon this historical evidence, it attempts then to outline the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of research on conference diplomacy in general, and on global conference diplomacy as represented by UN-sponsored world conferences in particular. The bulk of the article is devoted to an analysis of the ‘typical’ unfolding of conference processes, moving through the four stages of initiation, preparation, negotiation for decision-making, and implementation. Here, the article seeks to demonstrate the analytical usefulness, if not necessity, of distinguishing between two major types of world conferences: action-orientated and rule-making conferences.

It has been shown that, in a context of economic crisis, cooperatives remain more resilient and flexible than other forms of entrepreneurship. The current study investigates the possible explanations for the varying dimension of cooperatives sector in different countries. To this end, focusing on the institutional environment, this work introduces a variable not commonly found in studies on entrepreneurial activity, political activism. We present an empirical analysis based on a structural equation model (SEM-PLS) applied to a database on 52 countries. The model leads us to draw the conclusion that there exists a direct and indirect relationship between political activism and the size of cooperative sector.

The principal concern in this study is to provide a detailed discussion of the pragmatic properties of ‘possible’ modal adverbs, mainly by comparing conceivably with perhaps. First, we identify two factors regarding the occurrence patterns of these modal adverbs: their cooccurrence with modal verbs and their position in the clause, both of which are pragmatic-related characteristics. Two techniques were employed: analysis of manually coded corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and analysis of questionnaire data (from a completion test). The combined results demonstrate that the two adverbs display opposite functional characteristics, and that the factors influencing the use of these adverbs are strongly associated with the contexts of modality and discourse.

This study presents an interdisciplinary systematic review of the literature on donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding. The literature to date has explored differences in crowd’s behavior and incentives for participating in the platform, as well as the factors governing funding and post-funding success. The authors summarize the main findings to date and synthesize the different theoretical explanations for the decision-making behavior of the crowd. The investigation reveals how the literature to date has upheld the importance of crowdfunding as a social and democratic tool, one that demonstrates wise judgment and clairvoyance in recognizing potential successes and creating value for society.

This article explains why the power of organised labour in the reform of Swiss and German pension regimes has faded over the last three decades. Postindustrialisation has brought two different sets of reform issues onto the pension policy agendas of Continental European welfare states: retrenchment of existing benefit levels, and the pension coverage of new, postindustrial social risk groups. Recent pension reforms increasingly combine these two types of measures in encompassing policy packages –‘modernising compromises’– in order to compensate for retrenchment with selective expansive reform elements. Continental trade unions attach a lower importance to postindustrial modernisation than do the left‐wing parties – notably the Social Democrats and the Green parties. Consequently, the distance between the labour movement and the left‐wing parties, as well as intra‐labour heterogeneity, increase and ‘modernising compromises’ tend to divide the left and to marginalise trade unions. The empirical analysis relies on coded actor positions from eight major pension reforms between 1972 and 2003.