This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker's (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson's (1980) transitivity hypothesis, since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.

East Europe’s welfare states have undergone enormous changes in the two and a half decades since Communism collapsed. After forming part of a distinctive Communist political economy for four decades, they have been restructured in market-conforming directions that re-define public and private responsibility for societal well-being. Civil society or nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and market providers have entered the welfare sphere. The present paper maps divergent trajectories of East-Central European (ECE) welfare states and those of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), focusing on persistent legacies as well as innovation, political negotiation over reforms, and the strong influence of the European Union in shaping outcomes. It shows the growing role of NPOs across contemporary ECE and FSU welfare sectors, as advocates and as service providers partnering with governments. While NPOs remain comparatively weak in post-communist states, there is remarkable convergence of democratic and authoritarian regimes around policies of government–NPO partnerships to improve welfare performance.

Literature describing the social change efforts of direct social service nonprofits focuses primarily on their political advocacy role or the ways in which practitioners in organizations address individual service user needs. To elicit a more in-depth understanding of the varying ways that these nonprofits promote social change, this research builds off of the innovation literature in nonprofits. It presents a model of the typology of social innovations based on the empirical findings from survey data from a random sample (n = 241) and interview data (n = 31) of direct social service nonprofits in Alberta, Canada. Exploratory principal factor analysis was used to uncover the underlying structure of the varying types of social innovations undertaken by direct service nonprofits. Results support a three-factor model including socially transformative, product, and process-related social innovations. The qualitative findings provide a conceptual map of the varied foci of social change efforts.

I describe a typological gap in case and agreement alignment in ditransitive constructions. In languages in which verbal agreement is controlled by the subject and at most one object, object case and agreement in ditransitive constructions do not exhibit all logically possible combinations of alignment. I show that this typological gap follows from assumptions about the structure of ditransitive constructions (recipients c-command themes) and the interaction of morphological case and agreement (case marking restricts agreement). These assumptions derive exactly and only the attested patterns of alignment. I also argue that the typological gap in ditransitive constructions has a parallel in transitive constructions, providing further support for the proposals made here.

In economic development nonprofits, the disparity between the nonprofit’s, its donor’s and the poor’s expectations concerning poverty alleviation has been identified as the main reason for ineffective aid delivery. The study at hand contributes to this discussion by following this question: How do the nonprofit, its donors, the supported SMEs, and the poor refer to the nonprofit’s mission of poverty alleviation when negotiating accountability? To answer this question, the study follows the literature on accountability and resource dependency and presents results of an empirical case study on multiple accountability relations between a donor, a development aid nonprofit, its supported SMEs, and the poor living in the environment of the supported SMEs. The results show a pattern we call “resource-based accountability.” This pattern is constituted by the observation that most of the stakeholders tried to meet the expectations of the resource owners with respect to the resource owner’s understanding of successful poverty alleviation. Finally, the paper introduces a hypothesis for further studies.

This article sets out how the public sphere can be studied through an analysis of the content of a specific debate. A public discourse can be said to pertain to a European Union‐wide public sphere where the discourse within the EU is significantly different from that developed in non‐EU countries, where such differences are not nationally defined, and where the debates in individual newspapers (which provide the fora for a public sphere) should be connected on the basis of some underlying factors. These conditions are tested with a quantitative analysis of the newspaper debate in 1999 and 2000 on the sanctions of the EU‐14 against Austria. To the extent that the conditions are found, it can be concluded that there exists a European public opinion. The objective of studying this specific case is to demonstrate that, as far as an EU issue is concerned, there are already signs of an EU transnational political community.

The ESRC 1+3 funding model represents a major reform to postgraduate training in the United Kingdom. To ensure universities produce graduates with an adequate skills base, the programme prescribes a set of research methods and general and transferable skills, and restricts funding to institutions with accredited programmes. Although applications for places on accredited PhD programmes remain strong, one possible disadvantage is the potential concentration of funding among a small number of UK institutions.

We have entered an age of rapid and deep transformation of our learning environment. As with many other technological revolutions, facts are coming to us before we can understand and explain them. Computers have suddenly appeared on every university desk, and have rapidly substituted the typewriter and the pen as the dominant writing technology. Within a decade, we have moved from printed language, a five-century old technology, to electronic language. To be sure, words written through a computer can also be printed; yet, thanks to the spread of the Internet, a larger proportion of written words never get to see the black of ink. In any case, whatever the final output, the way our minds work when we deal with word processing programmes is radically different from the way they work with conventional print. And this inevitably influences the process of thought. We are all aware that we are facing dramatic change, yet very little time is available to investigate its nature and implications.

This article investigates the impact of party ideology on revenue politics. Theoretically, claims can be made that party ideology should matter for revenue policies. First, leftist governments are more favourable towards government intervention and a large public sector. To accomplish this, leftist governments need more revenue than bourgeois governments. Second, revenue policy is a redistributive policy area well suited for ideological positioning. However, the claim that party ideology does not matter can also be made since raising revenue is unpopular and politicians may shy away from new initiatives. Empirically, the question is unsettled. The article investigates the problem by looking at three revenue policy areas (income and property taxation, and user charges) in two countries (Denmark and Norway). The data used is from the municipal level, providing several hundreds of units to compare. The evidence favours the ‘parties matter’ argument, particularly in the Danish case.

Voter turnout for the 1984 presidential election in the USA was 30 percent lower than the last parliamentary election in Norway (1985). Similarities among the factors which explains non-voting in the two nations are apparent, but the factors unique to each country are important for understanding the difference in turnout level as well as patterns of non-participation. While the Norwegian non-voters are in a transient situation where youth and limited life-cycle experience determine non-voting, factors effecting American non-voters are more permanent. In particular, if socio-economic resources are not acquired in youth, the development of political involvement and participation will be obstructed.

Editors' introduction to the interview: Stephen Elstub articulates that deliberative democracy, as a theory, can be seen as having gone through various distinct generations. The first generation was a period where the normative values and the justifications for deliberative democracy were set out. This prompted criticism from difference democrats who saw the exclusion of other forms of communication by the reification of reason in deliberation as a serious shortcoming of the theory. This in part prompted the growth of the second generation of deliberative democracy, which began to focus more on the theory's operability. These theorizations, from the mostly 1990s and early 2000s, have led to the third generation of the theory—one embodied by the empirical turn. Elstub uses this genealogy as a foundation from which to argue that the current focus of deliberative democracy is on implementing deliberative systems rather than only deliberative institutions and this could potentially represent a fourth generation of deliberative democracy.

This study examines voluntary contributions from a microeconomic perspective, testing a distinction that has been prominent recently in economics but is novel in the study of voluntary contributions—between absolute and relative, or positional goods (goods whose value depends relatively strongly on position in relation to others). An experiment measuring social preferences under different conditions of positionality and visibility on a representative national sample (N = 607) revealed that voluntary contributions are largely positional, but that the positionality of volunteering is dependent on whether volunteering is visible or anonymous. These findings are discussed in the context of the economics of pro-social behavior, and implications for solicitation in different types of donors or volunteers are suggested.