The article examines the meaning of migrants’ (dis)enfranchisement within democratic polities, focusing on ideas of political authority and agency derived from democratic theory. Building on the notion that democratic voting represents a mutual and second-personal exercise of authority, the article argues that the disenfranchisement of migrants signifies their exclusion from agential authoritative relationships in politics, and ultimately, from a quintessential democratic mode of political agency. We recall some of the principles for expanding voting rights and acknowledge that there may be reasons in favor of exclusion. However, we highlight how any such exclusion (re)shapes the political relationships instantiated in the practice of voting. While we rebut the challenge of “voting fetishism,” we conclude by discussing how alternative forms of political participation for migrants, though important, cannot compensate for the unique impoverishment of political authority and agency that disenfranchisement specifically incurs.

In general, research demonstrates that deprivation, education, health, and well-being are determinants of volunteering, and that volunteering can play an important role in building stronger communities and provides many benefits for individual health and well-being. This study concentrates on the effects of physical and mental health and well-being as predictors when the aspect of socio-economic impact has been minimised. It utilises a unique data set from a UK Housing Association community with generally high levels of deprivation. Data were analysed using bivariate probit regression. In contrast to previous findings, physical health and mental health were not significantly related to volunteering. The key finding was that mental well-being was significantly related to informal volunteering.

This paper examines legitimacy and political space for civil society in violent and divided contexts. It draws on qualitative fieldwork with civil society groups in Burundi, where government restrictions and political violence have increased in recent years. However, not all civil society groups experienced these pressures in the same way, and some were more vulnerable to restrictions than others. This paper asks why and considers whether civil society legitimacy can help to explain some of these differences. In doing so, it develops a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and political space, and processes of legitimation and delegitimation in violent and divided contexts. The paper finds that the experiences of civil society groups in Burundi prior to the 2015 elections not only related to their organisational legitimacy, but also the extent to which they were perceived to challenge the political legitimacy of government elites.

This article examines selected system-level variables. Its premise is that a better understanding of how and why scholars may, or may not, choose an international orientation in their career requires taking into account factors beyond personal preferences or constraints. We suggest that characteristics of national systems shape prospects and strategies of internationalisation and look at two broadly defined variables: resource availability and career incentives. With respect to the first, we study the absolute level of national resources and their relative importance vies-a-vis those provided by the EU. With respect to the second, we consider the rules and norms governing the progress of academic careers, especially the extent to which international collaboration is significant and necessary for initially attaining a stable academic position and career advancement. We explore these questions through targeted comparison of four national cases, selected to ensure crosscutting variation across the selected variables. A comparison of two relatively low-resource cases (Bulgaria and the Czech Republic) with two relatively high-resource ones (France and Finland) is followed by a comparison with respect to career incentives. This allows to conclude that both factors should be considered as necessary conditions for internationalisation, and to suggest how this hypothesis might be further tested in subsequent research.

Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role of feminist research in democratic theory. She also opens perspectives toward mending the divide between a politics of recognition and a politics of distribution.

South European labour markets have gone through a substantial level of downward adjustment in wages (internal devaluation) and liberalisation in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. Yet, there have been differences in the extent of change between Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. These differences cannot be explained by the size of the economic crisis alone. While existing analyses focus on the extent of external pressure or party ideologies, this article focuses on the pre‐existing level of regulation by the state as opposed to regulation by social partners. It shows that devaluation and liberalisation were the most extensive in countries where governments possessed more tools to force down wages (statutory job protection, state regulations of collective bargaining, minimum wages), sometimes even against the will of employers. In contrast, countries with a higher level of autonomy for social partners (and fewer policy instruments available to governments to influence wages) devalued less. In some cases, the crisis led to more power to the state, rather than less. The article shows that state intervention can be a facilitator rather than a barrier to wage adjustment.

While many scholars have postulated the decline of membership influence as an important consequence of the professionalisation of civil society organisations (CSOs), other analysts have argued that traditional membership-driven CSOs are resilient and that hiring professionals does not necessarily diminish membership influence. This study sheds light on this issue by analysing membership influence in a representative sample of approximately 2000 CSOs from five European countries and the European level. As members generally have a strong influence on CSOs’ policy positions, our analysis demonstrates that the pessimistic tone in much contemporary scholarly work is largely unwarranted. On the contrary, hiring professionals does not invariably decrease membership influence and can, when members are closely engaged in advocacy work, even facilitate it.

While the importance of internal communication in nonprofit settings is well-recognized, its direct effects on members’ satisfaction and identification have been less explored. This study examines the role of internal communication satisfaction in influencing member satisfaction, professional identification, and organizational identification within professional associations, addressing a gap in nonprofit and organizational communication literature. The data were collected from members of the Medical Chamber in one of the central European countries via an online survey and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that satisfaction with internal communication positively impacts both membership satisfaction and identification with the professional association and the broader profession. Furthermore, professional association identification mediates the relationship between internal communication satisfaction and member satisfaction. These findings highlight the central role of internal communication in strengthening membership value, promoting professional identity, and fostering a deeper connection between members and their professional association.

This article argues for inductive exploration of mass–elite differences in new democracies. Grounded in the “delegate model” of political representation, I do this by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. The article demonstrates this approach using Tunisia, the only Arab democracy, by analysing survey data and originally coded party manifesto data. From an issue position perspective, the article uncovers mass–elite incongruence on the democratic–authoritarian and secular–Islamist political dimensions. From an issue salience lens, there is mass–elite congruence on the economic dimension. How mass–elite incongruence unfolds might affect the future of democracy in Tunisia.

“Participatory grantmaking” (PGM)—the practice of ceding decision-making power about grants to communities that are affected by the outcomes of the grants—is gaining traction in many philanthropic spaces. While there is emerging literature on PGM primarily in the Global North, few academic contributions explore how PGM plays out in the Global South. This article therefore advances the state of knowledge related to philanthropy and grantmaking, by analytically exploring PGM specifically in the African continent. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with 19 grantmakers within sub-Saharan Africa, the article identifies common forms of PGM in the region, its impact on various forms of power—particularly visible power—and the barriers encountered, including shrinking civil society space, resource scarcity, and back-donor demands. The article argues that PGM in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be seen as isolated in a silo of philanthropy, but that its contributions to addressing power imbalances must be integrated in broader long-term development sectors that are often dominated by the Global North. It also underscores that power, in its various forms, will always be present in PGM. Practitioners must continuously adapt and refine these models to address the uneven power dynamics in grantmaking that they aim to change.

The article offers a study of housing movements in Budapest and Bucharest, with the main focus on the developments since the financial crisis of 2008, stressing the role that both structural and contingent factors play in shaping the dynamics of this “field of contention.” It is argued that a structural view is enlightening for understanding the factors that form the interactive field between activists, such as differences in social positionality as well as ideological conflicts. Moreover, conceiving of a structurally produced field of contention can help explain the differences in housing contention in the two cities. The analysis situates housing movements and their allied, parallel, or opposing actors within the long-term processes of urbanization and global dynamics of commodification, including housing financialization. It demonstrates that to understand how structural and political factors interact in a complex field of contention, attention to processes beyond short-term local movements is necessary.

This research analyzes how gender equality influences the participation of European senior citizens in a range of volunteering activities (Social Awareness, Professional and Political, Education, and Religion). The main contribution is the simultaneous consideration of different levels of data aggregation: individual, national and welfare system. This allows conclusions to be drawn on the effects of variables linked to sociodemographic characteristics, gender equality and welfare systems. The empirical estimation utilised microdata from the World Values Survey (2005/09 and 2010/14) and the United Nations Development Programme. Results suggest that the European senior citizens appear to believe that they are more equal than the official statistics of their countries indicate. Men are more likely to participate in professional and education activities; women are more likely to be involved in religious organisations. Welfare systems influence volunteering behaviours. The promotion of macro-policies for gender equality could be important for increasing participation in non-profit organisations.

The calls for NGO accountability have grown louder in recent years, some based on genuine concerns to help improve their performance and others on a desire to muffle their advocacy activities. Using a comprehensive analytical framework, this article finds that current accountability approaches prioritize accountability to boards and donors and give weak accountability to communities despite strong NGO rhetoric to the contrary. The article recommends the development of accountability mechanisms managed by NGO coordination bodies and focused primarily on accountability to communities to improve NGO performance and protect them from politically motivated attacks.

In recent decades, biblical and early Christian studies have become more keenly aware and critical of how ancient Mediterranean literature perpetuates patriarchal stereotypes about women, incites gendered violence, and often participates in a culture of blaming women for the perpetuation of such stereotypes and violence. This article examines how the soul is gendered and made a victim of sexual violence in a Nag Hammadi text known as the Exegesis on the Soul (Exeg. Soul). After introducing Exeg. Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II, I examine how the text participates in victim blaming and in conversation with recent advances in classical and biblical scholarship, as well as key differences between Exeg. Soul and other texts in Codex II regarding their characterization of sexual violence. I argue that despite its usefulness in encouraging ascetics to resist desires and repent like the soul portrayed in the text, Exeg. Soul offers a less forgiving portrayal of divine intervention (or lack thereof) in moments of sexual violence and risks the revictimization of survivors.

Volunteering in emergency situations can involve the risk of injury. Overcoming such risks may motivate some volunteers, but may also deter those who are risk-averse. This presents a challenge, as recruiting and engaging volunteers with different risk attitudes is important to ensure response capacity and a balanced organizational culture. This cross-sectional study uses data from online surveys of search-and-rescue (SAR) volunteers (n = 1,659) and the general population (n = 3,185) in Norway to examine whether trust moderates a negative relationship between risk aversion and motivation in high-risk volunteering. Results from OLS regressions show that SAR volunteers have higher levels of risk propensity (B = 0.25, p < 0.001), trust (B = 1.47, p < 0.001) and felt trust (B = 1.36, p < 0.001) than other volunteers. Risk-averse volunteers report lower motivation and participation, but trust mitigates much of the negative impact (interaction term B = −0.10, p < 0.01). These findings underline the importance of strong cultures of trust within SAR volunteer teams.

In this discussion of democracy's conceptual pluralism(s), Frederic Schaffer holds a guiding lamp to show what researchers should take into consideration in the study of “the democracies” and their “rough equivalents” as can be found across language, culture, time, and space. This act generates a focus on practical tactics in research and knowledge dissemination. Is it, for example, best to establish an international committee of democracy's epistemic experts to gather, code, and organize the meanings of democracy and their rough equivalents as can be found in the world? And, with such a committee or something altogether different, how can we relate this information to pro-democracy institutions and activists when so many appear to be interested only in liberal conceptions of democracy? The discussion ends with considerations of an open range of research and activism in the fields of democratic theory, comparative politics, and democratization.

Ample survey research and content analysis has established that NGO internet presence is qualitatively weak and characterized by the dominance of asymmetrical communication. We argue that the emergent communicative and social paradigm of on-line interaction forms what could be defined as a wicked problem. NGOs, seen as a ‘sender’ of information, may well face a crisis of accountability determined by the very nature of the media; whereas the NGOs’ ‘information receivers’ often are deprived of the very possibility of stakeholder relatedness. In the internet-based/on-screen ‘universe’, information and electronic flow are assumed to be continual, which supersedes the entity logic crucial to NGO accountability and legitimacy. In designing their social media presence, NGOs may, therefore, face an impossible challenge.

Informed by Stéphane Vial’s analysis of the nature of on-line interactive media, we evaluate these conundrums. Then, inspired by Lucas Introna and Fernando Ilharco, we question the dialogic potential to ‘screen-being’. While the shift from an ‘actor-centric’ to ‘flow-oriented’ paradigm of ‘screen-being’ is inherent to digital communication, it destabilizes the entity-grounded accountability of NGO legitimacy. Hence, we end with explicating the risks to dialogic relatedness of ‘sceen being’ for NGOs. By so doing, we challenge the oft vocalized perspective that NGOs ‘just’ have to increase their digital communications in order to improve their relations with various stakeholders.

Events such as pandemics, natural disasters, and other social issues reveal societies’ increasing reliance on voluntary unpaid workers. However, there is a decline in people’s willingness to volunteer with established organisations. While management research has shown that leadership plays a major role in motivating and retaining paid employees, further investigation is needed to understand how leadership motivates volunteers. This paper integrates leadership literature into a widely adopted volunteer motivation model through a narrative review, aiming to distil precise leader behaviours that could be used to fulfil or trigger people’s motivation to perform unpaid work. Our goal is to draw clear conceptual links between the different facets of leader behaviours and volunteer motivation and highlight the role of leadership in triggering and fulfilling volunteer motivation and therefore sustaining vital volunteer workforces. Limitations of our chosen approach, implications, and future research directions are discussed.

Disappointed by the numerous failures of anticorruption reforms, international organisations, scholars and policy makers increasingly place their hopes on measures aimed at enhancing gender equality and in particular increasing the inclusion of female representatives in elected assemblies. Yet most studies to date focus on aggregate measures of corruption and fail to explain why the correlation between women's representation and levels of corruption occurs. Using newly collected regional‐level, non‐perception‐based measures of corruption, this study distinguishes between different forms of corruption and shows that the inclusion of women in local councils is strongly negatively associated with the prevalence of both petty and grand forms of corruption. However, the reduction in corruption is primarily experienced among women. This suggests that female representatives seek to further two separate political agendas once they attain public office: the improvement of public service delivery in sectors that tend to primarily benefit women; and the breakup of male‐dominated collusive networks.