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.

Are statistical methods useful in distinguishing written language from nonlinguistic symbol systems? Some recent articles (Rao et al. 2009a, Lee et al. 2010a) have claimed so. Both of these previous articles use measures based at least in part on bigram conditional entropy, and subsequent work by one of the authors (Rao) has used other entropic measures. In both cases the authors have argued that the methods proposed either are useful for discriminating between linguistic and nonlinguistic systems (Lee et al.), or at least count as evidence of a more ‘inductive’ kind for the status of a system (Rao et al.).

Using a larger set of nonlinguistic and comparison linguistic corpora than were used in these and other studies, I show that none of the previously proposed methods are useful as published. However, one of the measures proposed by Lee and colleagues (2010a) (with a different cut-off value) and a novel measure based on repetition turn out to be good measures for classifying symbol systems into the two categories. For the two ancient symbol systems of interest to Rao and colleagues (2009a) and Lee and colleagues (2010a)—Indus Valley inscriptions and Pictish symbols, respectively—both of these measures classify them as nonlinguistic, contradicting the findings of those previous works.

Present day welfare societies rely on a complex mix of different providers ranging from the state, markets, family, and non-profit organizations to unions, grassroots organizations, and informal networks. At the same time changing welfare discourses have opened up space for new partnerships, divisions of labor, and responsibilities between these actors. For nonprofit organizations this means that they operate in complex institutional environments where different institutions and logics compete with each other. In this special issue we have collected a number of articles that analyze how organizations and organizational fields adjust to a new environment that is increasingly dominated by the logic of the market, and how in particular nonprofit organizations, as hybrids by definition, are able to cope with new demands, funding structures, and control mechanism.

This paper provides a general orientation to narrative inquiry and demonstrates its relevance to research on grassroots associations. While there is an increasing recognition that grassroots associations warrant greater attention from researchers, the paper argues that there must be an accompanying call to broaden methodological approaches used to understand them. Accordingly, it is advanced that the meanings associated with grassroots associations are embodied in narrative and illuminated by its study. To demonstrate this claim, the paper outlines explanatory and descriptive approaches to narrative inquiry, offers examples as illustrations of each approach, and discusses the analysis that accompanies them. In doing so, the paper attempts to foster an appreciation for narrative inquiry as a “new” method with which to study grassroots associations.

Individual voters’ identification with a political party is believed to be a highly stable core of the political personality, and an ‘unmoved mover’ of political behaviour. In this article, the authors take advantage of a unique longitudinal database – the German Socio‐Economic Panel (GSOEP) – to test the basic premise of partisanship's high persistence. Analysing individual‐level data from 18 annual panel waves conducted in West Germany between 1984 and 2001, it was found that only a minority of the electorate appears steadfast with regard to partisanship over the entire period. Using event history analysis, the authors demonstrate how movements from partisanship into independence and changes between parties are affected by: personal attributes of voters, especially cognitive mobilisation; by properties of their social contexts, in particular spousal relationships and family constellations; by situational contexts, specifically election campaigns; and by the type of party with which voters identify.

The text identifies the main issues that undermine the position of the Czech Political Science and International Relations journals. We argue that structural factors such as the delayed start of the discipline, lack of contact with the international environment, the transfer of inadequate theoretical and methodological knowledge has significantly affected the functioning and development of professional journals in the Czech Republic. The authoritarian regime limited the development of the social sciences, and Czech (Slovak) Political Science endured an extremely negative attitude from the authorities. Thus, journals in the field of Political Science and International Relations were founded without deeper insight into Western practice. Furthermore, their strive to move from the scientific periphery has also been limited by the lack of human capital and financial constraints. To close the gap, which persists even today, the authors came up with a series of recommendations, such as the language of publication, topic specialisation, insisting on scientific rigour, and emphasising communication with the academic community, both domestic and international. By discussing the practice and the meaning of ‘catching up with the West,’ the paper contributes to understanding hierarchies and dependencies between the global Political Science and International Relations core and CEE as a scientific semiperiphery.

Analyses of turnout in British general elections fall broadly into two camps: those based on constituency–level data, and those based on survey data. The former stress the importance of local context, while the latter stress personal characteristics and viewpoints. Underlying both are a range of theories purporting to explain turnout. However, to date, there has been little systematic attempt to analyse turnout in the round. In this paper, we combine survey and constituency data to study the individual and contextual correlates of turnout at the British general election and 1992. Constituency level analyses seem to confirm the importance of local context, though it declined during the 1980s. However, and contrary to analyses which employ constituency data only, while individual electors’ decisions on whether or not to turn out are influenced by their personal circumstances, they are not influenced by local context.