Are televised election debates (TEDs) a blessing for democracy, educating citizens and informing them of their electoral options? Or should they be viewed as a curse, presenting superficial, manipulating rhetoric in one-way communication? In this article, I evaluate TEDs from a deliberative point of view, focusing on the potential positive and negative outcomes of framing by politicians, as well as on the pros and cons of displaying emotions in debates. I argue that the use of these two rhetorical devices in TEDs is potentially helpful in inspiring deliberation, perspective-taking and subsequent reflection in both politicians and voters. This leads me to conclude that televised election debates should be critically approached as communicative venues with potential deliberative qualities.

Volunteering is associated with health-promoting benefits for both recipients and volunteers and may contribute to a more inclusive society. However, studies have shown a persistent pattern of social inequality among those who volunteer, and immigrants participate as volunteers less than the majority population. To date, approaches for recruiting immigrant populations have not been sufficiently examined, even though multicultural societies are becoming increasingly diverse. This study investigates how recruitment is carried out in voluntary organizations and how volunteers who are involved in recruitment reflect on the inclusion of citizens with immigrant backgrounds. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 18 volunteers and three employees with recruitment responsibility at five voluntary organizations engaged in welfare and community-related activities in a semirural district in Norway. Our findings show that different structural factors and individual aspects of the recruiter influence the recruitment of immigrants as volunteers. Large-scale organizations are more professionalized and more directed by fundings and frameworks and demand more qualifications due to their volunteer tasks. This might make inclusive recruitment more challenging. Small-scale organizations have more flexibility and less professionalized volunteer activities, making recruitment more inclusive. In addition, if the small-scale organizations are minority driven, it seems to positively influence the recruitment of immigrants through increased diversity sensitivity and more connections with immigrants through their social network.

Nicaea and the local church culture from which it emerged are examined to reveal that the lower clergy and laity had a distinct role in acclamation. They voted in episcopal elections and enjoyed a more intimate relation with their bishop. These elements of a dispersed authority are then used to critique contemporary governance in the Church of England as under- and over-centralised and to call for a renewal of a Dionysian understanding of hierarchy as enabling a more spiritual understanding both of episcopacy and of the participation of the whole people of God.

The cytochrome P450 enzymes catalyze the hydroxylation of organic substrates by dioxygen. The high-potential reactive intermediate in cytochrome P450 catalysis, compound I (CI), has the capacity to deliver oxidizing equivalents (holes) to the side chains of tryptophan, tyrosine, and cysteine amino acids. Successful P450 catalysis requires that CI reacts more rapidly with a substrate than with these redox-active residues. The kinetics of hole transfer to tryptophan, tyrosine, and cysteine residues in four different P450 enzymes have been modeled using X-ray crystal structure coordinates and the semiclassical theory of electron transfer. Monte Carlo sampling of reaction driving forces has been used to account for uncertainties in the formal potentials of redox-active groups. The kinetics simulations suggest that the mean survival lifetimes of holes on the hemes range from ~100 ns to ~100 μs. Although hole transfer to the enzyme surface through redox-active amino acid reduces substrate oxidation efficiency, it can protect the enzyme from damage when reaction with substrate fails.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the potential link between religious participation and civic engagement in Sweden. Religious participation probably plays a different role in a secular context compared to a context where religion and politics are more intertwined. First, do those who regularly attend religious services in Sweden volunteer and participate in charitable giving more often compared with those who do not? Second, are those who regularly attend religious services more, or less, politically active between elections compared with those who do not in Sweden? Third, do those who regularly attend religious services in Sweden receive more requests to volunteer than those who do not? The study uses survey data on volunteering from random samples of individuals in Sweden. Results showed that volunteering was limited to a restricted group of organizations. There is a higher propensity among those who regularly attend religious services to volunteer within political parties. Those who frequently attend church were significantly more often requested to volunteer by someone else.

This article combines the fields of deliberative theory and citizenship studies. Drawing from a deliberative experiment on foreigner political rights with almost 300 German citizens, we find that a short virtual deliberative treatment produced a clarification effect, whereby especially those with already negative views increased their scepticism. Participants in our deliberative treatment displayed higher levels of argument repertoire and integrative complexity, underlining that the treatment led to well‐considered opinions. A qualitative analysis of participants’ substantive rationales unravels traces of what De Schutter and Ypi dub ‘mandatory citizenship’, implying that political rights must be attached to obligations. These results have wide ranging implications: They indicate that the practice of deliberation is not quasi‐automatically programmed to progressive outcomes (as some have argued) but can have a communitarian dimension (where preferences are determined on the basis of existing communal values and self‐understandings); this suggests that participatory practices may not always advance progressive reforms.

Systematic and openly accessible data are vital to the scientific understanding of the social, political, and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article introduces the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), which has generated a unique, publicly available data set from late March 2020 onwards. ACPP has been designed to capture the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Austrian population on a weekly basis. The thematic scope of the study covers several core dimensions related to the individual and societal impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The panel survey has a sample size of approximately 1500 respondents per wave. It contains questions that are asked every week, complemented by domain-specific modules to explore specific topics in more detail. The article presents details on the data collection process, data quality, the potential for analysis, and the modalities of data access pertaining to the first ten waves of the study.

In the context of super-diverse cities, scholars and policy makers are increasingly interested in the potential of volunteering to establish identification for newcomers and locals alike. In this paper, we address the question of how young volunteers in Rotterdam and Vienna negotiate belonging within their super-diverse surroundings. Our exploratory study builds on a cross-national research project in which we collected qualitative interview data from volunteering youth. We follow a weak-theory approach and conceptualise belonging as emotional, procedural, and relational. We trace identification processes of newcomers and locals in terms of belonging through volunteering in urban contexts of super-diversity. Our paper demonstrates that volunteering serves as a vehicle for feelings of belonging and inclusion for young volunteers, specifically addressing the urban super-diversity of Vienna and Rotterdam. Our research also indicates the partiality and temporality of volunteering as a source of belonging and the function of volunteering as a structure of inclusion, not necessarily enabling structural inclusion.

While the international literature has significantly addressed the “new forms of voluntary action,” there has been limited attention paid so far to the reintermediation processes of contemporary volunteering. This paper intends to fill this gap. First, a research approach based on a renewed sociological consideration of volunteering, path dependency and strategic field theory is presented and four ideal–typical traditions of volunteering (active membership, direct, program-based and organize-it-yourselves) are introduced. Then the Italian case is explored. Although the analysis is only exploratory, it enables us to understand the coevolutions of the four traditions and to identify a new restructuration model based on professional agencies coming from the membership tradition. The paper can help future studies to reconsider the magnitude and dynamics of second modernity trends and to tackle continuities and changes in the reintermediation of volunteering in situated and processual terms.

International comparative research on civil society has subordinated Africa’s diversity and specificities to other geographies and histories. Results are prejudiced global conceptualisations, questionable enumeration, problematic theory formulation and ill-conceived approaches to development initiatives intended to make African civil society ‘stronger’ and states more democratic. This article sets out a case for an endogenous approach to civil society enquiry as a political category sensitive to the continent’s particularisms. In order to locate discussion about meanings, measures and measuring, a conceptual framework for research is described which avoids conflation with other epistemologies. Such a contribution will assist in sharpening thinking and discussion about the boundary characteristics of what is to be investigated.

Social enterprises face complex institutional logics due to their focus on both economic and social goals, resulting in institutional tensions. Interorganizational collaboration is a strategy to cope with environmental turbulence and complexity. Guided by institutional theory and the literature on interorganizational collaboration, this study examines the role of partnership building in managing institutional tensions and hybrid organizational forms undertaken by social enterprise organizations. With interview data collected from 15 social enterprises in a southeastern state in the USA, this study demonstrates that the majority of the sampled organizations reported experiencing organizing and learning tensions while a couple reported performing and belonging tensions. Organizations leveraged specific cross-sector partnerships to obtain legitimacy and sustain their businesses. A typology of partnerships (community engagement, resource acquisition, and dual-value) is proposed based on organizational forms and activities undertaken by various SEs to manage these tensions.

By applying the concept of participatory spaces, this article maps and analyzes current research on mental health service user organizations (MHSUOs). We have analyzed research literature from 2006 to 2016 to examine how the role of and challenges facing MHSUOs are formulated in the post-deinstitutional era. The current situation is marked by MHSUOs parallel presence in invited, claimed and popular spaces for participation. The post-deinstitutional era is characterized by a shift in focus from gaining access to such participatory spaces, to critically examining the political opportunities available in these. We further argue that the dominance of psychiatry-specific spaces could prevent MHSUOs from fully exploring their potential for participation in broader social issues.

This paper contributes to our understanding of volunteer management by charting some important challenges associated with the governance of one of the UK’s largest timebanking networks. While timebanking is often treated as a form of volunteering, many timebank advocates are keen to distinguish it sharply from traditional volunteering. We suggest that this tension generates a fundamental ‘performance paradox’ in the management of timebanks in the voluntary sector. We draw on political discourse theory to characterise and evaluate associated challenges, suggesting that, when viewed against a host of context-specific organisational and policy pressures, the progressive potential of timebanking cannot be realised as a distinct community economy without adequate support. Instead of taking up a position alongside more traditional forms of volunteering, timebanking is more likely to be subsumed by them.

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software‐assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy.

This research analyzes the relationship between board composition and web transparency in nonprofit organizations (NPOs). The board is conceived as a governance mechanism that not only monitors management but also gives voice to all stakeholders and considers accountability—and, more specifically, web transparency—as a key instrument for the NPO’s legitimization. To conduct this study, we manually built a database from the CVs of 793 directors of 67 Spanish non-governmental development organizations and we use fuzzy set comparative qualitative analysis (fsQCA). Our results indicate that board composition (size, independence, gender diversity, and presence of directors with financial or NPOs’ expertise) influences transparency and that, depending on the organizational size and legal form, there are different board configurations that lead to high transparency. Generally, NPOs should include experts in nonprofit sector and more female members on their boards to increase transparency.

Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec is spoken in the community of Teotitlán del Valle, in the Central Valley of Oaxaca in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Teotitlán Zapotec is one of the Central Zapotec languages, which belong to the Zapotecan language family within the Otomanguean language stock. Teotitlán Zapotec has two mid-front vowels, [ε] and [e]. The distribution of these two mid-front vowels is conditioned by the nature of the adjacent consonants and accent and presents challenges to formal analysis due to a number of properties predictive of the distribution: the disjunctive set of consonants conditioning the alternation, the ganging effect of consonant type and syllable structure as triggers, the featural characterization of the process as raising assimilation, and asymmetries between derived and non-derived environments in the observed patterns.

The family Trypetheliaceae is a diverse lineage of crustose lichenized fungi occurring almost exclusively in the tropics. Based on material collected in eastern Colombia in the region of the so-called Piedemonte Llanero, we describe here a new species for this family, in the genus Marcelaria, the fourth species known in the genus. The new species, Marcelaria casanarensis, is characterized by a clear hamathecium and large ascospores, similar to the neotropical M. purpurina, but it produces orange instead of red superficial pigmentation, outwardly agreeing with the two paleotropical species, M. benguelensis and M. cumingii. The new species thus appears to provide a morphological link between the currently known neotropical and paleotropical taxa. However, the pigment chemistry is closer to that of M. purpurina, so the orange colour is to be interpreted as homoplasy. Phylogenetically, based on an analysis of two markers, M. casanarensis and M. purpurina are closely related but M. casanarensis differs in two larger insertions in two different regions of the mitochondrial small subunit rDNA (mtSSU). A key to the four species currently accepted in Marcelaria is presented.

This article illustrates how qualitative and network evidence complement one another for obtaining a deeper understanding of meso-level social orders theorized as strategic action fields. Making use of network data based on Twitter follower relationships and building on a previous qualitative study on the food charities active in Greater Manchester, we show how network-analytic formalizations of even apparently unimportant digital connections—Twitter ‘follows’—can provide meaningful insights into the functioning of strategic action fields. Focusing on this local charitable food provision field, the article makes a number of broader empirical and methodological contributions potentially relevant to the study of non-profits and other multi-organizational fields. The results of the network analyses mostly confirm the findings obtained using qualitative data, but also point to potential contradictions and puzzles that may indicate further lines of inquiry. In the discussion, we highlight the strengths and limitations of this approach and suggest how researchers could use easily available digital network data at different phases of their field investigations.

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude.

Jewish Hebrew writings spanning the Middle Ages to Modern times across multiple genres frequently include a large number of biblical quotations, often merged semantically and syntactically with the original material. This biblical metatext—mostly employed through metaphors, allusions and allegories—serves as a literary device, fulfils an aesthetic function, and endows the text with didactical, historiosophical or theological depth. This article will focus on the influence of this metatext in Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and will examine cases where it demonstrates a specific type of historical thought, reflective of certain theological perceptions. The article will outline a tentative model of the phenomenon of biblical metatext through its cultural and social functions in traditional Jewish culture. Presenting this phenomenon as an “open work”—a concept developed by Umberto Eco—enables us to more clearly analyze the interaction between author and reader, as well as their creative process.