This paper seeks to start a debate about how political scientists in Europe might continue to help each other develop, and how the discipline might begin to tackle the challenges posed by the Sorbonne and Bologna agreements. We believe it is important that political science and political scientists face these challenges, because otherwise it is likely that the answers will be provided for us by others less familiar with the needs and demands of the discipline itself.

Higher education today is confronted by a number of challenges. The ICT revolution is one such major challenge, in that it has revolutionised the way in which knowledge can be transmitted - no lecturer worth his salt is now unfamiliar with PowerPoint as an aid to presenting material, whilst most students regularly trawl the Net in search of information for essays and seminars, if not for the essays themselves.

Governance networks typically function in the absence of clearly defined constitutional rules. Network actors, therefore, have to develop a common understanding of the problem as well as build a basis for mutual trust. We suggest that discourse-analytical and dramaturgical concepts can be helpful instruments to analyse these dynamics of trust building in governance networks.

In this paper, the authors analyze different forms of interface between the government and third sector organizations in Québec. In order to do so, they studied relationships in eight different fields of activity: homeless youth services, housing for intellectually deficient people, support organizations for natural caregivers, community leisure centers, community housing for the elderly, daycare centers, social economy organizations for domestic assistance, and services specializing in employment for handicapped people. Following a review of international literature on the relationship between the government and the third sector, the paper analyzes these relationships on the basis of the typology developed by Jennifer M. Coston, which is adapted to the Québécois context. In the eight activity sectors studied, the authors found the presence of four different types of interface between the government and the third sector: “subcontracting,” “coexistence,” “supplementarity,” and “co-construction” relationships.

The last two decades have witnessed a veritable mushrooming of NGOs in India. What, however, is inadequately appreciated is that the conversion of voluntarism into primarily a favoured instrumentality for developmental intervention has changed what was once an organic part of civil society into merely a sector — an appendage of the developmental apparatus of the state. Further, this process of instrumental appropriation has resulted in these agencies of self-activity losing both their autonomy and political-transformative edge. What is required, therefore, is to reorientate voluntarism from a framework of subserving the needs of delivery to one promoting self-governance in the widest sense.

The development of the European Community entails harmonization of policies in many areas. This paper analyses to what extent harmonization has taken place in the traditional fields of social policy. Interventions by the EC authorities in the social policy area, here termed direct harmonization, are examined. Indirect harmonization, resulting from common economic policies and the internationalization of the economy, is used as a key concept in an empirical study of the development of coverage, benefit levels and methods of financing in the main social insurance systems within the EC countries, since 1955. The corresponding development in the EFTA countries is here used as a baseline for comparison. The results are discussed in light of the thesis that also in the social field EC policies may fruitfully be interpreted in terms of the EC's main objective of economic integration. Some criteria for the consideration of future developments are suggested.

This study examines how different types of international volunteering influence common program outcomes such as building organizational capacity, developing international relationships, and performing manual labor. Survey responses were collected from 288 development-oriented volunteer partner organizations operating in 68 countries. Data on the duration of volunteer service, the volunteers’ skill levels, and other variables were used to develop a rough typology of international volunteering. Binary logistic regression models then assessed differences in outcomes across five volunteering types. Findings suggest that future research needs to be more precise about how the nuances and complexity of diverse forms of international volunteering influence outcomes.

This article analyses the consequences of the narrative construction of the group of countries that has been grouped as ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) for their sovereign debt risk rating. Acronyms for groups of countries can provide a useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities in economic profile and prospects. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these terms as heuristic devices are usually not well elaborated. This article examines the process whereby the ‘PIIGS’ group came into being, traces how Ireland became a member of this grouping, and assesses the merits of classifying these countries together. The contention is that the repetition of the acronym in public debate did indeed shape the behaviour of market actors toward these countries. It is argued that this involved a co‐constituting process: similarities in market treatment drives PIIGS usage, which in turn promotes further similarities in market treatment. Evidence is found of Granger causality, such that increased media usage of the term ‘PIIGS’ is followed by increased changes in Irish bond yields. This demonstrates the constitutive role of perceptions and discourse in interpreting the significance of economic fundamentals. The use of acronyms as heuristics has potentially far‐reaching consequences in the financial markets.

This research focuses on understanding how giving circle (GC) member identities are associated with the identities of funding recipients. It examines whether GC members are more likely than non-members to give to people who are like them (bonding social capital) and/or to people who are not like them (bridging social capital). We draw on data from a survey of GC members and a comparison control group of non-GC members. Findings show GC members and those not in GCs are both more likely to give to a shared identity group—related to race, gender, and gender identity—leading to bonding social capital. However, GC members are more likely than those not in GCs to give to groups that do not share their identity, suggesting GCs also encourage bridging social capital. We assert both bonding and bridging social capital might lead to the democratization of philanthropy by expanding giving to historically marginalized groups.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the need of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) to provide services for its members to assist them in the provision of teaching and learning supports for their students. Moreover, this article outlines what the newly established ECPR standing group, Teaching and Learning Politics, can do to support ECPR members in their teaching role. It begins by discussing the perceived need for advancing political science education in Europe. The article continues by describing previous activities of the ECPR and of the European Political Science Network in promoting the teaching and learning of politics. It provides a comparison of the ‘teaching and learning’ support activities in Europe and the United States. Finally, the article introduces the newly established standing group of the ECPR, Teaching and Learning Politics, and outlines its activities and plans to support political science teachers, in particular beginner teachers, in Europe.

Food banks have become the first line of response to problems of hunger and food insecurity in affluent nations. Although originating in the USA, food banks are now well established in Canada, Australia, and some Nordic countries, and they have rapidly expanded in the UK and other parts of Europe in the past two decades. Defined by the mobilization of food donations and volunteer labor within communities to provide food to those in need, food banks are undeniably a response to food insecurity, but their relevance to this problem is rarely assessed. We drew on data from the 2008 Canadian Household Panel Survey Pilot to assess the relationship between food bank use and household food insecurity over the prior 12 months and examine the interrelation between food-insecure households’ use of other resource augmentation strategies and their use of food banks. We found that most food-insecure households delayed bill payments and sought financial help from friends and family, but only 21.1% used food banks. Food bank users appeared to be more desperate: They had substantially lower incomes than food-insecure households who did not use food banks and were more likely to seek help from relatives and friends and other community agencies. Our findings challenge the current emphasis on food charity as a response to household food insecurity. Measures are needed to address the underlying causes of household food insecurity.

Party ideology plays an important role in determining which government coalitions form. Research on coalition formation tends to focus on the ideological distance between coalition parties. However, the distribution of preferences within the coalition, and the legislature, also has implications for which government coalition forms – that is, a party's willingness to join a coalition depends not only on its prospective coalition partners, but also on the alternative coalitions it could form. Several hypotheses about the effects of legislative polarisation are offered and tested using data on coalition formation in 17 parliamentary democracies in the postwar period. This article also demonstrates how the traditional measure of ideological divisions within coalitions fails to capture certain aspects of ideological heterogeneity within the cabinet (and the opposition) and how Esteban and Ray's polarisation index helps in addressing these deficiencies.

This introduction to the forum section on the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) developed by John W. Kingdon argues that the conditions under which policy making takes place today increasingly resemble the assumptions upon which Kingdon built his lens. At the same time, while the framework is extremely successful with regard to citations and has been applied in various contexts that often differ remarkably from those for which the framework was originally developed, a systematic theoretical debate about the Multiple Streams Framework is still lacking. It is the intention to spark such a debate with this forum section.

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross‐country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, the national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master‐issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect that there is a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master‐issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single‐dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy‐seeking strategies, with protest being a common type of this political strategy. In party systems where single‐dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master‐issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest‐ and party‐system agendas. To investigate this theory, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master‐issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master‐issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master‐issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single‐dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post‐2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.

According to the relevant literature, the relationship between government and the private foundation sector in Germany is marked by a “paradigm of conflict” very similar to the one that has often dominated the U.S. discussion of government/ nonprofit relationships in the past. More specifically, scholars often hold that the development of foundations in Germany is largely hampered by an administrative and regulatory climate that weakens rather than strengthens the foundation community. Two main arguments are brought forth in this context: First, the expansion of the state bureaucracy into traditional activity fields of foundations “crowds out” the foundation sector, second, the structure of tax regulations is detrimental to a “sound” development of foundations. However, while these arguments figure prominently in the policy debate, they have neither empirically nor analytically been substantiated as of yet. Borrowing from organizational theory, this article critically evaluates the arguments in the light of available evidence in an effort to contribute to a better understanding of foundations in an international context.

Over the last two decades, nonprofit organizations in the United Kingdom (UK) have faced increased pressure to measure their activities in order to demonstrate their competency, to achieve legitimacy, and to obtain funding. This paper draws from recent literature in the sociology of science to examine quantification in the British voluntary sector as a historically situated and socially constructed process. Using archival and secondary documents, I find that quantification is not a new practice for charities in the UK; moreover, while they have employed metrication in the past, what activities nonprofits have measured, and the importance of measurement for their organizational success, has altered over the course of the century.