Focusing on selected “Western” conceptions of democracy, we expose and normatively evaluate their conflictual meanings. We unpack the white democracy of prominent ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke, which comprises an elitist bias against the demos, and we discuss different assessments of his 1964 apologia of Apartheid South Africa. Our critical-historical study of Röpke's marginalized meaning of democracy traces a neglected anti-democratic continuity in his work that is to be contextualized within wider elitist (neo)liberal discourses: from his critique of Nazism in the 1930s to the defense of Apartheid in the 1960s. We provide an alternative, marginalized meaning of democracy that draws on Marxist political science. Such a meaning of democracy helps explain why liberal democratic theory is ill-equipped to tackle anti-democratic tendencies re-emerging in liberal-democratic polities.

Political participation can take shape in many types of participation, between which the overlap is low. However, the similarities and differences between various types of participants are surprisingly understudied. In this article, I propose to differentiate between four types of participants: institutional political participants, non-institutional political participants, civic participants, and political consumers. These types differ from each other on two dimensions: whether they are political or publicly oriented and whether they are formally or informally organized. Building on the matching hypothesis, I argue that we should differentiate those four types of participants by their outlook on society (societal pessimism, political trust, and social trust). Using data from the European Social Survey 2006, including participants from 19 countries, logistic regressions show that institutional political participants trust politics rather than people, non-institutional political participants are societal pessimists who trust other people, civic participants are societal optimists who trust other people, and political consumers are pessimists who do not trust politics.

Ensuring universal access to scientific research and upholding the principles of keeping data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable is of paramount importance to the democratization of science. However, upholding these principles becomes increasingly complex with the increasing scope of data collection, the more different types of data we collect (e.g., survey, text, or institutional and country-level macro data), and the more research teams are involved in data collection. In the domain of democracy research, scientists across Europe are therefore joining forces to launch the research infrastructure monitoring electoral democracy (MEDem), which aims to establish itself as an open platform where the fragmented crowd of researchers in the various research fields can coordinate and develop common standards for data collection both retrospectively as well as prospectively to make their data interoperable, and (comparative) democracy research more productive. Moreover, MEDem will help make democracy research data and findings accessible to the general public (e.g., citizens, journalists, and policymakers).

Civil society leadership training programmes are a new phenomenon, and they are often overlooked by civil society scholarship despite being linked to the professionalisation of the sector. In this article, we examine 14 Swedish leadership programmes in order to identify leadership ideals in the sector. Drawing on the notion of ‘symbolic boundaries’, we argue that leadership programmes produce horizontal boundaries in relation to other societal sectors and vertical boundaries between leaders of the sector and other members. Together, these symbolic boundaries form a leadership ideal that detaches leaders from their organisation and internal democratic processes, instead depicting leadership as a question of personal characteristics and values. Leaders in the sector need to be authentic and to anchor their leadership in the personal values they hold. Theoretically, our analytical model may prove useful in the study of other empirical phenomena in civil society.

Some phonologically significant generalizations result from processes, often formalized as rewrite rules, while others result from interactions among independently motivated processes, often formalized in terms of serial ordering. We adopt these general formalizations of processes and interactions to address two questions. One is the interaction question: what are all the possible forms of interaction between two processes? The other is the opacity question: what makes an interaction between two processes opaque? We show that these questions are best addressed with a rigorous algebraic formalization of processes and their pairwise interactions, describing the complete formal typology of process interactions and identifying the formal properties of those interactions that lead to different types of opacity.

The rise of citizens’ initiatives is changing the relation between governments and citizens. This paper contributes to the discussion of how governments can productively relate to these self-organizing citizens. The study analyzes the relation between the social production of invited spaces and the invitational character of such spaces, as perceived by governments and citizens. Invited spaces are the (institutional, legal, organizational, political and policy) spaces that are created by governments for citizens to take on initiatives to create public value. We characterize four types of invited spaces and compare four cases in Dutch planning to analyze how these types of invited spaces are perceived as invitational. From the analysis, we draw specific lessons for governments that want to stimulate citizens’ initiatives. We conclude with a general insight for public administration scholars; in addition to formal rules and structures, scholars should pay more attention to interactions, attitudes and meaning making of both government officials and citizens.

The debate on the ‘perils of presidentialism’ has been raging for over 30 years and gone through at least three waves. It began with the influential work of Juan Linz and most recently has seen the emergence of a rich literature on coalitional presidentialism, which has demonstrated the capacity of presidents to manage fragmented multi-party legislatures, and hence overcome the dangers of political deadlock. Jean Blondel’s last book (African Presidential Republics, Oxford, Routledge, 2019) belongs to this latest wave in the sense that he argues that presidential systems can overcome their limitations, and that certain aspects of the presidential models actually give them an advantage over parliamentary equivalents. This article reviews Blondel’s argument against the latest developments in African politics. I suggest that there are fewer instances of positive presidentialism today than Blondel hoped for, in part because democratic progress has often proved to be particularly vulnerable to later autocratization due to a tendency not to entrench gains via constitutional reforms. Despite this cautionary note, however, I conclude that Blondel is right to reject the idea that African cases provide support for the ‘perils of presidentialism’. This is not only because Blondel highlights a number of presidents who played a benign or positive role in their country’s political development, but also because the coalitional presidentialism literature suggests that there is little evidence that parliamentary systems would perform significantly better.

This paper examines how far a post-event volunteering legacy is facilitated by event organising committees leveraging existing volunteering infrastructure in host communities. The paper uses the lens of regulatory capitalism to examine how the organising committees of the Sydney 2000 and London 2012 Olympic Games engaged with the third sector, and specifically the volunteering infrastructure of the host nations, in the planning, delivery and post-event phases to create a volunteering legacy for the host community. The two case studies involved 27 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders representing the organising committees and the volunteering infrastructure in the host cities. While the Sydney Olympics had no specific remit for legacy planning, the third sector led legacy efforts in Australia. At the London Olympics, there was a failure to engage with the third sector, which limited government-led legacy planning and implementation. In the latter case, the framework of regulatory capitalism prioritised contracts with the private sector over meaningful engagement with the third sector.

Literature in the field of employability and the third sector has focused upon the impact of marketisation on third sector providers, elaborating how commissioning processes have led to a contraction of (smaller) third sector organisations (TSOs) and an expansion of larger private sector bodies. Extant research does not however explore the role of third sector organisations in the employability of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Therefore, our paper explores this gap by adopting a qualitative approach via a total of 36 interviews involving migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and managers of third sector organisations, alongside a categorisation of TSOs. Our findings reveal that TSOs are the primary (and for asylum seekers perhaps the only) providers of integration support services and training or education services. We found that only a limited number of organisations provide formal employability services or skills development services which seem to be only residual in terms of the range of activities that TSOs can organise. Thus, perhaps the main function that TSOs perform that enables integration into the UK labour market is providing a safe and trusted environment that people can use to increase their confidence, improve their well-being, broaden their social circle, learn the language or increase their work experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents Northern-based development organisations with unprecedented difficulties. They are challenged in fundraising opportunities in their home countries and in finding ways to continue their work in the Global South. As the first study to present a systematic mixed method, cross-country study of small-scale, voluntary development organisations in four different European countries, this study provides insight into the role of these private development initiatives (PDIs) in the COVID-19 crisis and sheds light on the differential impact of the crisis on these organisations. Whereas most PDIs are involved in long(er)-term development interventions, the COVID-19 crisis was for most organisations their first experience of emergency aid. Overall, we see strong resilience among PDIs and also find that the organisations which relied more exclusively on traditional methods of fundraising (offline) received a greater funding hit than organisations—often with more younger members—that had already moved to online fundraising.

Nonprofit organizations in Russia are introducing for-profit activities as a means of gaining autonomy from external donors, and as instruments of strategic planning and sustainable development. This study focuses on organizations that work with welfare provision and explores how they reconcile entrepreneurial activities with their social mission. More specifically, we interrogate how two institutional logics, business and nonprofit, are defined and reconciled in organizational identities, structures and hierarchies. Socially oriented nonprofits define their mission through service to beneficiaries, through personal and professional dedication to beneficiaries’ well-being, and through making an impact on public policies and the society at large. They mimic a business approach in strategic planning and meticulous reporting, but subordinate profit-seeking to social mission by integrating entrepreneurial activities into already existing organizational structures, or by separating them into independent entities.

Following the Sasanian conquest of Bactria-Tukhāristān in the third century CE, Kushan cultic traditions centred on the veneration of anthropomorphic divine images continued to thrive under the new Persian rulers. Rather than imposing aniconic Zoroastrian practices, the Sasanians actively patronised local religious customs, commissioning statues of Persian deities such as Anāhitā while incorporating Bactrian gods into their visual and ritual repertoire. Numismatic and architectural evidence reflects this synthesis: Kushano-Sasanian coinage preserves the Kushan pantheon, with deities depicted in novel forms, including enthroned figures and busts emerging from fire altars, while temples at Surkh Kotal and Dilberjin combined divine statues with the veneration of the sacred fire. The coexistence of Bactrian and Middle Persian in inscriptions suggests a broader process of cultural adaptation. The persistence of these practices under subsequent Hunnic rule, and their later diffusion into Sogdiana, demonstrates their long-term impact on the religious landscape of Central Asia. The Kushano-Sasanian period thus marks the emergence of a distinctive cultic tradition, shaped by the cultic fusion, which continued to influence the region long after the decline of Sasanian rule.

Men’s Sheds are unique community-based mutual-aid not-for-profit membership organisations, which aim to use activities such as craftwork to improve men’s health. While the Men’s Sheds movement appears to be growing, with Sheds in Africa, Europe, Oceania and North America, there is limited understanding of what makes a thriving Shed or membership association more widely. This paper uses in-depth qualitative interviews with committee members of Men’s Sheds in Western Australia to uncover what makes a thriving Shed. The findings reveal that the key factors relate to having an inclusive governance, an inclusive space for activities, supportive networks, and sufficient resources. Overall, a thriving shed is one where members feel included. The paper proposes a framework for a thriving Men’s Shed and offers insights for other membership associations.

Disaster management research increasingly focuses on how to collaborate with emergent volunteers in order to support formal disaster agents in the nonprofit sector (Whittaker et al. in Int J Disaster Risk Reduct 13:358–368, 2015; Strandh and Eklund in J Conting Crisis Manag 26(3):1–9, 2017). In a disaster context, we regard emergent collaboration between these agents as an appropriate approach for structured self-organization (Simsa et al. in Nonprofit Volunt Sector Q, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764018785472) and hence for providing sustainable disaster relief. Our research seeks to identify which factors facilitate such emerging collaborative efforts. Using survey data from Austrian refugee migration in 2015/2016, we examine how social capital components affect the collaborative efforts between nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and emerging volunteers on a team level. Data evaluation is based on regression analysis. We provide empirical evidence that social capital components like ‘avoidance of misunderstanding’ and ‘interaction frequency’ enhance the collaborative efforts between NPOs and emergent volunteers. Furthermore, the study highlights the roles of ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘intimacy’ in collaborative disaster relief performance.

Although government-organized volunteering is common in China, the Chinese government has also sought to encourage the development of grassroots volunteer service organizations (VSOs) given the tremendous social service burden and the complexity of social governance. Motivated by the lack of systematic studies on volunteering in China, this study explores predictors of volunteering in urban China using data from the 2013 Survey on Philanthropic Behaviors of Urban Citizens in China. The findings indicate that generalized trust, membership in the Chinese Communist Party and type of work unit are significantly associated with the government-organized volunteering. Similar to Western countries, education, religiosity and social capital variables all help in explaining grassroots VSO-organized volunteering. Interestingly, the association between grassroots VSO-organized volunteering and trust in the central government with regard to both participation probability and time devoted to volunteering is significantly positive, whereas the association between grassroots VSO-organized volunteering and trust in local government, for both participation probability and time devoted to volunteering, is significantly negative.

In recent years, the debate over the need to address ecological and social concerns has grown substantially. Phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological versus social disputes in industrial sites (such as, for example, the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have constituted a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, making the understanding of the various underlying preferences very important. Furthermore, growing environmental concerns have challenged more traditional views anchored on the predominance of social and employment concerns. The article, in line with the research questions raised in the introduction of the Symposium, intends to contribute to the above-mentioned debate addressing the following questions: did the European Union take an ‘eco-social’ path? If so, how and why? The article illustrates the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the various actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda in order to obtain further institutional (i.e. internal) and socio-political (i.e. external) legitimation.