Studies have repeatedly documented the cost of ruling: governing parties generally suffer electoral defeats. We approach this empirical law of political science from the perspective of another empirical law: the incumbency bonus, the fact that incumbents get more media attention than the opposition. Our claim is that the bonus constitutes an electoral liability because it reflects the critical approach of media to government power. News featuring incumbents is therefore associated with a more negative tone than news featuring the opposition. This incumbency burden in turn affects government support negatively. Empirically, we draw on an extensive news corpus covering four European countries over two decades, combined with monthly poll data. Analyses show that the incumbency burden in political news is an empirical reality, and that variations in the burden contribute substantially to predictions of government support. Finally, the negative burden effect is stronger for single‐party cabinets, but stable throughout government tenure.

How does public opinion affect political discourse on issues that parties struggle to deal with? Although scholars tend to analyse party–voter linkages in terms of policy positions, parties can respond to public opinion by changing both the positions and the salience of their policy agenda. Based on original time‐series data of party discourse and voter preferences in France, Italy and the United Kingdom (1992–2016), this paper analyses how mainstream parties have changed their political discourse on European integration in response to an increasingly Eurosceptic public. Results show that mainstream parties have adapted their positions to changes in public opinion and have at the same time deemphasized European Union issues in their discourse as the public grew Eurosceptic. Parties did not talk more about Europe even when they followed the tides of public opinion. These findings challenge our current understanding of party responsiveness, have implications for theories of party competition, and contribute to debates on the legitimacy of the European project.

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of financial industry lobbying efforts that result in specific regulatory rules being dropped from the regulatory agenda, or what we call ‘rule omission’. Critically, existing research either ignores rule omission or characterizes it as the pinnacle of lobbying success. We argue that only in carefully mapping out industry preferences and tracking what happens to rules following their omission can we say something about the extent to which finance wins or loses in its effort to shape regulation. Our analysis is based on two in‐depth case studies from the European Union: (1) solvency rules in the Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision Directive (IORPP II), where rule omission does reflect a strong case of industry influence; and (2) short selling rules in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD), a case of rule omission resulting in more stringent rules over industry activities.

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. However, legislators cannot be responsive to all voters at all times with regard to the policies the latter favour. We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to re‐establish themselves as responsive to the public's wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis‐à‐vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness.

Accountability in grant-making requires a valid, fair and transparent selection process. This study proposes a four-step framework for validating such a process: determine standards for qualified applicants, assess inter-reviewer reliability, assess factorial validity, and assess reliability. This framework is applied to the Corporation for National and Community Service’s 2013 RSVP grant-making process. The standards were close to the highest points of reliability. Inter-reviewer reliability was above 0.90, a common threshold for high-stakes measurement. After conducting confirmatory factor analysis, the final model merged two of the original five domains of selection criteria, resulting in four domains. The final model was found to have strict measurement invariance, high convergent validity, and measurement reliability between 0.88 and 0.93 for all domains. The results validate the 2013 review process and indicated that the scores exhibited high degrees of reliability, giving public assurance that the process was sufficiently objective and accurately reflected program priorities.

The increasingly obvious unsustainability of neoliberal capitalism creates an urgent need to understand how societies can meet their needs in a just and sustainable fashion. The new theoretical framework of the “Foundational Economy” may provide answers, as it explores a holistic transformation of essential reliance systems, such as food provision, energy, care, and housing. However, its conceptualization of democratic agency needs to be strengthened.

This article addresses this need by expanding the Foundational Economy framework with insights from the literature on social reproduction theory (SRT) and the solidarity economy (SE). SRT highlights the gendered and racialized hierarchies of essential reliance systems as key targets for transformation, while the SE encompasses participatory and non-capitalist practices that can democratize those systems. This expanded framework is applied to the UK agroecology movement, which aims to build democratic, sustainable, and non-capitalist alternatives to the food system, while subverting its classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities.

Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.

Financial exploitation (FE) of older adults results in devastating consequences. Studies have highlighted social and cognitive factors as separate risk factors of FE, but few have considered their interactive effect on FE risk. This study examines whether social relationships, cognitive functioning and their interactions are associated with FE experiences in a nationally representative sample of 704 community-dwelling Israeli adults aged 50 or older who were part of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel) Wave 8. Participants self-reported whether or not they experienced FE over the past 12 months and completed assessments of cognition and social networks. Cognitive tests (word list learning, word list delay, animal fluency, and serial 7s) were z-transformed and combined into a composite score of global cognition. A logistic regression model regressed FE on the presence/absence of children, spouses, other family and friends in networks, global cognition and covariates. Interactions between global cognition and each of the four relationship types were also tested. The presence of children and that of friends in network were associated with lower likelihood of FE group membership. The effect of having friends in network on FE was significant for those with average or above-average global cognition, but not for those with below-average global cognition. Findings suggest that the presence of friends in social networks should not be overlooked as a potentially protective factor for adults aged 50+, especially for those who are cognitively healthy. Preventative programmes may focus on strengthening friendships among older adults at higher FE risk.

Research on the relationship between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the public sector has been dominated by predictions of isomorphism where change and tensions in NPOs are attributed an imposing institutional setting. This article argues that research represents a selective perspective on organizational life due to its portrayal of organizational change as synonymous with an isomorphic, linear trajectory. The purpose of this article is to illustrate different sources and characteristics of change and tension. The article presents an analytical framework comprising of four components: evolving change, episodic change, inherent dilemmas, and conflicting logics, facilitating an understanding of the organization as movement. The analysis of a case study organization suggests that by identifying different dimensions of changes and tensions we can gain a richer understanding of the complexity of processes underpinning the organization as movement. The analysis reveals how multiple, parallel processes related to change and tensions generate reflections that drive integrity and identity formation at individual and organizational levels.

Media Competence (MC) enables citizens to efficiently utilize information and communication technologies, for both consuming and producing content, in order to participate in digital society in a responsible and reflective manner. Its integration in the curriculum requires inter-sectorial collaboration, which includes not only education authorities, but also key actors such as Civil Society Organizations (CSO). The present study examines the perception of CSO with regard to the integration of MC in the curriculum of basic education in Latin American countries. For this, a survey was designed that was stored in a digital platform. It was completed by 63 CSO from fourteen different countries. The main findings indicate that: a) the CSO recognize the importance of teaching MC and the associated challenges, such as the digital divide, the lack of political will, and the lack of understanding of the concept by the population in general; and b) they contribute through the creation of education resources and the teaching of classes for teachers and other vulnerable groups; however, it is crucial to strengthen the network of collaboration with other groups of interest, prioritize MC in their agendas, and ensure that CSO receive training in this area.

This short article offers a practical introduction to archival research for political scientists working on European politics. Archival documents are increasingly recognized as a relevant data source for process tracing analyses in small-N or mixed methods studies. Previously classified archival documents are exceptionally trustworthy due to their original confidentiality. Their rich and detailed content facilitates the understanding of causal mechanisms. Still, the hurdles for working with archival sources are high for political scientists. Lack of experience, no special training in handling historic documents, and a shortage of textbooks meeting their demands are a few of the problems political scientists planning archival research face. In the article, I highlight the opportunities of archival research and demonstrate how challenges can be overcome. I emphasize that the archival field trip should only be planned once researchers have gained substantive context knowledge. In their preparation, researchers should use all the resources archives offer and develop measurable expectations from theories.

This paper uses non-traditional approaches to predict why volunteers remain in or quit a non-governmental organisation position. A questionnaire featuring 55 predictors was conducted via an online survey mechanism from March to May 2021. A total of 250 responses were received. The subsequent data analysis compared logistic regression and artificial neural network results, using machine-learning interpreters to explain the features which determined decisions. The results indicate greater accuracy for neural networks. According to the logistic regression results, intrinsic motivation, volunteering through an NGO and the age of volunteers influenced the intention to remain. Moreover, NGOs that offered online volunteering opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic had higher rates of intention to remain. However, the neural network analysis, performed using the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) method, indicated the need to consider different predictors to those identified by the logistic regression. The LIME method also enables the individualisation of the explanations of predictions, indicating the importance of considering the role of volunteers’ feelings in both quit and remain decisions, which is something that is not provided by traditional methods such as logistic regression. Furthermore, the LIME approach demonstrates that NGOs must address both volunteer management and experience to retain volunteers. Nonetheless, volunteer management is more critical to stop volunteers quitting, suggesting that volunteer integration is crucial.

NGOs have taken up an increasing number of roles and responsibilities in Latin American societies. Based on a study of the multi-stakeholder platform, the Water Resources Forum in Ecuador, this paper shows how through the creation of a broad network of NGOs, academics, grassroots water users organizations and governmental actors; this platform has been able to contribute to the democratization of water governance. This paper analyses the international and national socio-political context in which this platform developed and traces the history and strategies that marked its development. Based on this, it argues that NGOs can play an important role in the development of more democratic and inclusive public policy making in water governance, but that the capacity of NGOs to bring about change greatly depends on the socio-political context and on the networks they are able to forge with grassroots organizations, state agencies, funders and other third sector actors.

The aim of this study is to understand how a new nationwide nonprofit organization, Victim Support Sweden (VSS), emerged in just a few years without public or political demand. In this qualitative study, we reconstruct and follow the first years of the organization. The study is based on a content analysis of VSS’s archival documents from 1988 to 1992 and retrospective interviews with key persons. The results acknowledge the power of entrepreneurs in establishing the organization. The entrepreneurs used their skills, engagement, and backgrounds to “make sense” of the organization, even though there were no crime victims calling for support. They combined logics from adjacent fields and created a specific new “victim support logic.” Thereafter, the logic spread quickly through the entrepreneurs’ lobbying of politicians and education of local victim support volunteers.

This study investigated the collaboration between public and third-sector organisations (TSOs) in the framework of collaborative governance. We examined how TSOs portray their collaboration with public organisations and what kind of collaboration agency can be identified based on these descriptions. Using a discourse analytical approach, we identified three multifaceted, and somewhat paradoxical, types of collaboration agency discourse in third-sector organisations: situationalised, service system–oriented, and dependency-driven. We argue that collaborative governance both sets expectations and shapes the agency of TSOs. At the same time, TSOs strategically use these opportunities to their advantage, constantly reshaping their collaboration with public organisations.

The adoption of active learning pedagogy and, later, the institution of the employability agenda in Higher Education have resulted in a severe loss of agency for academics and students in the Social Sciences. In this article, we reflect on our experiences of applying active learning methods. We argue that we have been part of a change that has occasioned a loss of key skills development, especially those associated with traditional learning and academic thinking. An overly headlong rush to implement the “new” over the “old” saw the discarding of certain skills central to the active learning agenda. Further, the emphasis on student satisfaction, professionalisation and quality assurance pushed the academic to the sidelines, to the detriment of Higher Education. We, therefore, first critique the skills debate and identify shortcomings in the active learning application that emerged from that debate. We focus on the skills emphasised in practice, how they are portrayed in opposition (instead of complementarity) to academic skills, and how they undermine the agency academics and students really require. Next, we propose a reconsideration of necessary but undervalued skills like reading, listening and note-taking.

This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studying the distribution of acoustic cues (duration, intensity, F0) in controlled data. The results show that initial syllables in Georgian words are marked by greater duration than all subsequent syllables, regardless of syllable count and phrasal context. After excluding domain-initial strengthening as an alternative explanation, this finding provides evidence in favor of fixed initial stress. Likewise, initial syllables are marked by greatest intensity, but the consistent gradual drop in intensity throughout the word suggests that this effect may not be stress-related. The F0 results align with the existing accounts: individual lexical words form accentual phrases marked by a low pitch accent on the initial syllable and a high final boundary tone on the final syllable. Additionally, new evidence for a phrasal accent, aligned with the penult, is presented. F0 targets are shown to be completely absent in the context of post-focal deaccenting, which shows that F0-marking in Georgian is reserved for phrasal prosody and is not intrinsic to stress-marking. These results help account for the facts related to word stress, phrasal intonation, and their interplay in Georgian, the object of debate in the literature.

Immigrants without citizenship are usually excluded from democratic participation. It is often argued that this is a grave injustice that calls for redress; immigrants should be enfranchised whether they have citizenship or not. Most arguments for this claim hold that immigrant enfranchisement is justified by immigrants’ interest against being ruled by the receiving state. In this article, I argue that this view fails to explain why immigrants should be enfranchised. I offer an alternative view according to which immigrant enfranchisement is justified by a shared interest of immigrants and citizens in relating as mutually serving agents of justice by participating in the common undertaking of ruling the polity justly together.