Here I recount my experience as a three-term Senator of the Italian Republic between 1983 and 1996. It is a personal memoir written with a modest dose of self-praise and nostalgia. I have tried to explain how the Italian parliament works, to analyse the relationships between parliamentarians and parties, with special emphasis on the Italian Communist Party, whose voters sent me to the Senate, and to indicate what I have contributed and what I have learned. For better or worse, throughout that long period, I remained a professor of political science. Hence, I have also made reference to those of my writings that have been directly influenced by my experience of ‘real’ politics, as well as to my efforts to influence ‘real’ politics. Much has changed in Italian politics and my experience, which could not be repeated today, suggests that not much has changed positively.

This article examines a model of the domestic political economy of subjective employment insecurity in advanced industrial societies. Based on data on people's attitudes toward their job as well as levels of and kinds of social protection collected in 15 OECD countries, it shows that there are distinct manifestations of job insecurity that are affected differently by distinct aspects of social protection programs. While the analysis shows that social protection measures reduce employment insecurity, it also reveals that overall levels welfare state generosity do not have any systematic effect on whether workers feel secure. The article's findings suggest the need to decompose the different components of employment insecurity as well as disaggregate national systems of social protection when examining the impact of welfare states on job insecurity.

Von Prince, Krajinović, and Krifka (2022) argue that irrealis is a crosslinguistically legitimate semantic category, and they define it in terms of a domain encompassing both future possibility and counterfactuality. In this response, we argue that this definition is too narrow, because it excludes past and present possibility and necessity. We suggest instead that the correct characterization is that irrealis expressions correlate with quantification over possible worlds—or in simpler terms, with modality. We then ask a compositional question: do irrealis expressions signal the presence of modality contributed by other morphemes in the clause, or do they contribute modality themselves? Based on a comparison between the languages in von Prince et al.'s sample and preliminary data from Lutuv (Lautu) Chin (South Central Tibeto-Burman, formerly called Kuki-Chin), we suggest that the answer to this question may vary from one language to the next, thereby contributing to a richer picture of how modal meaning is reflected and encoded crosslinguistically.

While numerous accounts of policy frameworks associated with country-level support for social enterprise activity exist, explanations for when, why and how policy interventions in support of social enterprise have been adopted have been, to date, much more thin on the ground. This paper aims to contribute to addressing this perceived gap by presenting the case of Scotland, recently hailed by First Minister Alex Salmond as “the most supportive environment in the world for social enterprise”. Historical Institutionalism is used to explain how such a ‘supportive environment’ might have come about and, looking at, in turn, when, why and how the conditions for social enterprise in Scotland have developed, we attempt to contribute to the ongoing international debate concerning the importance of the policy environment to fostering the conditions for social enterprise activity not only to emerge, but also to thrive.

Volunteers are integral to the delivery of health and social services in many countries. Volunteer motivation is the key phenomenon around which research into the psychology of volunteering behaviour has been based in the recent past. This study comprised interviews with 26 volunteers working with eight health and social care organizations in Ireland. The study aimed to describe and interpret reasons for initial and continued volunteering involvement. Four key themes were proposed on the basis of a thematic analysis: volunteer motives; personal connections to organizations and causes; benefits; and challenges arising from volunteering. These themes are analysed in light of social psychological theory to better understand why people volunteer and maintain their involvement in the face of competing demands. The findings suggest that benefits and challenges merit a higher profile in research into the volunteer process, and that bonds of perceived obligation motivate many volunteers to begin and continue their involvement in health and social care.

Based upon findings in other fields in the social sciences, it is proposed in this article that cooperation between government parties can be induced when parties in governments are able to exercise credible exit threats. As stability is more likely to be induced by cooperation than by defection, more durable governments can be expected. The possibility for credible exit threats in a government is operationalized via the presence of a dominant party in the government. The corresponding prediction is tested against a data set that contains 261 postwar governments in twelve western multiparty democracies. In the event history analyses of government survival, I control for variables pertaining to the bargaining environment, bargaining complexity, and the ideological diversity of the governments. It is found that the presence of dominant parties in governments does indeed enhance the survival time of governments.

In their target article, Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz (2020) have raised several issues and suggestions relating to improving racial equality within the scientific field of linguistics. While accepting the general premises of the authors' original article, this response piece offers reasons and suggestions for expanding the scope of the authors' original aims to apply to a broader, global audience. Four main issues are raised as justification and also as measures for expanding the call to action. These are: (i) the fact that the Linguistic Society of America is the flagship linguistics organization not just for US linguists, but for linguists throughout the world; (ii) the global influence and, in association, the responsibility placed on US and North American linguists to serve as trailblazers in our field; (iii) the applicability of the authors' suggestions within different academic settings, and what can be learned from cross-fertilization of ideas across different communities; and (iv) the critical role of English as a vehicle for spreading not only knowledge about linguistics, but also harmful ideologies about race, class, and ethnicity.

Volunteer travel opportunities are more plentiful than ever and are now offered worldwide, with conservation projects being an increasingly popular choice. Some of the emerging questions in this field are concerned with the effective communication of these opportunities to young people. One theory that could guide the creation of these persuasive campaigns for conservation volunteering is regulatory focus theory. By adopting this theory, we reveal yet another possibility for understanding motivations of conservation volunteers. Results of the experiment suggest promotion messages are better received (more persuasive) because they induce expectations in line with general view of conservation volunteering as a hedonic experience. Moreover, this study is the first one of its kind to show this important effect of environmental attitudes on individuals’ responses to promotional messages about conservation volunteering travel.

Despite renewed interest in the concept of interdisciplinary research, the social sciences have produced very little evidence for its feasibility or success. Acknowledging the diversity within comparative politics, this article argues that we have scant evidence of interdisciplinarity, some evidence of successful multidisciplinarity in problem-driven research and more frequent examples of cross-disciplinary borrowing, particularly when comparativists have reached a theoretical plateau in capturing new or persisting puzzles. There is little evidence to support the expectation that interdisciplinarity can create a new epistemology that exceeds disciplinary knowledge.

Abstract. The concepts that address different paths to transformation of the welfare state as a ‘workfare’, an ‘enabling’ or an ‘activating’ state share the idea that traditional welfare policies, mostly aiming at decommodification, are more and more replaced by social policies emphasising (re‐)commodification. Activating labour market policy therefore is supposed to play a central role within the paradigm shift of welfare state policies. It is understood to involve a mix of the enforcement of labour market participation, the conditioning of rights and growing obligations of the individual at one side, and an increase of services in order to promote employability and restore social equity at the other. In this article, the different perceptions of the workfare and the enabling state perspectives on the positive and negative aspects of activating policies are reconstructed as ‘pure forms’ in order to obtain theoretical standards against which the empirical cases of activating labour market policies in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany are characterised and compared. The actual reform path is described by a combination of two indicators: the strength of the workfare and the strength of the enabling elements of the activating labour market policies. The evidence on activating labour market reforms confirms that in both dimensions a move in the same direction is taking place, but without producing growing convergence. Different welfare state types keep on producing different mixes of workfare and enabling policies, leading to very different levels of decommodification and (re‐)commodification. Thus, an ongoing divergence of policies also exists within the new paradigm of an activating labour market policy, although single countries seem to change their alignment to a particular welfare state type.

Docents often claim to face problems in teaching exchange students. This article focuses on tackling such problems in a comparable course concerning ‘politics and public space’. The concept of public space allows discussions concerning subjects of political science as power, democracy, segregation, privatisation and citizenship. On the other hand, the contributions from different academic fields (sociology, social history, arts) and the use of multiple teachings methods make the course attractive for students of other disciplines. The assignments show that students' eyes were opened not only to Dutch and Finnish spaces but also to those in their home countries.

The Rabin II cabinet became a minority government following the withdrawal of the Sephardi-religious Shas party in September 1993. In spite of this, the government quite easily survived a number of no-confidence votes in the Knesset due to the pivotal (median) position of the Labour party. Two Knesset factions-Hadash (three Knesset seats) and the Arab Democratic List (two seats)—supported the government almost automatically. They did so because of their political positions which are considered to be more ‘leftist’ (i.e. more ‘dovish’) than those held by the two formal coalition partners-Labour and Meretz. This provided the government a workable ‘blocking majority’ of 61 out of the 120 Knesset members.

This article surveys two concomitant developments in European political methodology. First, we point to a recent methodological convergence across Europe and the Atlantic. Second, we note a broadening methodological divide between explanatory and interpretive approaches to political phenomena. This survey provides a backdrop for introducing a new ECPR Standing Group in Political Methodology as an outlet for new methodological techniques and a venue for exchange across Europe's broad methodological spectrum.

Only one change in the cabinet took place during the year, on 24 January 1994. That followed the unexpected death of the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Johan Jørgen Holst, on 13 January 1994. He was replaced by the Foreign Trade Secretary, who was in turn replaced by the Secretary of Social Affairs. She was replaced by the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Ms. Hill-Marta Solberg, an MP from the county of Nordland.