Small, isolated populations of cold-adapted species at the edge of their climatic range are highly sensitive to environmental change, making them powerful ecological indicators. Cetraria sepincola (Ehrh.) Ach. is an epiphytic lichen which illustrates this role. It is common in Nordic countries, but in the southern parts of its European range, its distribution has become fragmented and restricted to cold habitats. We studied populations in habitats of high conservation value such as wetlands, montane stone fields, and wooded meadows in south-west Germany, where it persists at the edge of its ecological range in Central Europe and is becoming increasingly rare. Its dependence on specific climatic conditions and selectivity in its photobiont associations make it particularly responsive to shifts in climate and land use. Through historical records, recent observations, data on nitrogen deposition and associated species, we identified key environmental factors shaping the distribution of C. sepincola. Our analysis confirms that populations in south-west Germany occur at the climatic margin of the species’ Central European range. We also found that high-density local populations are linked to low ammonia (NH3) concentrations. Cetraria sepincola associated specifically with Trebouxia lineages from clade S (e.g. OTU S28 = Trebouxia barrenoae and OTU S27), commonly found in lichens from acidic substrates. We found the same Trebouxia lineages in the co-occurring acidophyte Hypogymnia physodes (L.) Nyl., a likely local photobiont donor for C. sepincola, which lacks asexual propagules. At some sites, species of the nitrophytic Xanthorion community started to colonize the same twigs as C. sepincola. In our study area, typically more nitrophytic species from the families Teloschistaceae (e.g. Polycauliona polycarpa (Hoffm.) Frödén et al., Xanthoria parietina (L.) Th. Fr.) and Physciaceae (Physcia adscendens H. Olivier) host Trebouxia algae from clades which are incompatible with C. sepincola. The spread of nitrophytic species and their associated photobionts into formerly acidophytic communities could also reduce the likelihood of finding compatible photobionts for C. sepincola. Climate change, possible direct toxic effects of NH3 on the mycobiont, and indirect impact of NH3 on the lichen and photobiont community exacerbate the extinction risk for sensitive lichens, particularly at the edge of their distribution range.

This article addresses the Chinese debates on utopian and dystopian modes of democracy. It opens the black box of the one-party state and delves below the surface of the People's Republic of China's official statements on “democracy” (e.g., “people's democracy,” “democratic centralism”) by focusing on the often-overlooked “democracy” contemplations within the highly fragmented Chinese academic communities. These reflections indirectly respond to the debates and governance practices in other world regions—with the US being referred to as the main “mirror” image. The article mainly focuses on the first two office terms of Xi Jinping. Developments since this re-appointment as head of the Chinese party-state in 2022 (and 2023), however, indicate that the “democracy” frame continues to serve as core element of the Chinese role-identity narratives.

We prove the vanishing of bounded cohomology with separable dual coefficients for many groups of interest in geometry, dynamics, and algebra. These include compactly supported structure-preserving diffeomorphism groups of certain manifolds; the group of interval exchange transformations of the half line; piecewise linear and piecewise projective groups of the line, giving strong answers to questions of Calegari and Navas; direct limit linear groups of relevance in algebraic K-theory, thereby answering a question by Kastenholz and Sroka and a question of two of the authors and Löh; and certain subgroups of big mapping class groups, such as the stable braid group and the stable mapping class group, proving a conjecture of Bowden. Moreover, we prove that in the recently introduced framework of enumerated groups, the generic group has vanishing bounded cohomology with separable dual coefficients. At the heart of our approach is an elementary algebraic criterion called the commuting cyclic conjugates condition that is readily verifiable for the aforementioned large classes of groups.

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.

Volunteering involves caring for the outcomes of others and typically long-term orientation so that one can achieve goals that are not always clearly visible in the short term. As with any activity, volunteering attracts people of different social value orientations—some rather individualistic, some rather altruistic. The aim of the study was to find out whether the future time perspective, which promotes thinking about future goals and planning, is linked to volunteers' declarations of the probability of them continuing volunteering in a month, year, and three years and whether this link is moderated by social value orientation. An online questionnaire-based study was performed on a sample of 245 volunteers. The results indicated that the higher the social value orientation, the greater the predicted probability of continuing volunteering. Future time perspective was related to the predicted probability of continuing volunteering in all investigated time horizons only when volunteers had a more individualistic than altruistic social value orientation. Younger age and longer experience with volunteering were also linked to the predicted probability of continuing volunteering in a year and three years (but not in one month). The results show the importance of social value orientation and future time perspective for more individualistic volunteers in their willingness to volunteer further. The study has practical implications for organizations' management, who should consider developing cooperation skills in their volunteers. For competitive volunteers, they may also highlight how challenges could make an impact in the future so that they intend to remain active.

Jean Blondel’s personal and scientific biography deserves to be illustrated, as it can in many ways also be an illustration of the laborious making of a genuinely European (though not only) political science from the ashes of World War 2, and the failures (uncertainties) of pre-WWII political science. Here it will briefly be recalled how an enthusiastic and innovative institution builder gained a central place in the making of the new European political science, and how Blondel coupled this with his tireless exploration of new fields of comparative politics, while being at the same time a generous mentor of PhD students and younger scholars and, for many, a great friend.

During the last three decades Dutch church attendance rates dropped considerably, while the relative share of volunteers in non-religious organizations decreased at a slower rate. This is an unexpected development given the positive association between religious involvement and volunteering. In this article, we try to account for this development by addressing the following question: Why has a massive and ongoing decline of church attendance in the Netherlands not resulted in a similar drop in the relative number of volunteers in non-religious voluntary organizations? In view of this question, we wonder if the negative effect of declining church attendance on volunteering is perhaps counterbalanced by a positive effect of educational expansion. Our findings reveal that this is indeed the case, but these counterbalancing effects are only modest.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) that deliver services on behalf of public authorities operate under increased competitive and standardization pressures. Given this background, many CSOs experience a need to justify why public authorities should continue to fund them. In this article, we underpin and develop a new understanding of added value, proposing it to be the perceived social value of services or programs provided by a CSO that differs positively from the perceived social value of services or programs provided by other organizations and can be identified as functional, altruistic, emotional, or social. We elaborate on these four forms of added value and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this understanding.

The Academic Freedom in Constitutions dataset is a new resource that empirically maps constitutional guarantees of the freedom of science, of academic freedom, and of university autonomy in 203 countries, spanning the period from 1789 to 2022. While the topic of academic freedom has been gaining increasing prominence in political and legal research over the past decade, it is so far largely absent from the comparative constitutional literature. However, its global codification process holds interesting insights for the study of international norm diffusion, both with respect to its functional connection to higher education development and its distinct constitutional genealogies. The paper first introduces the dataset and explains how it is different from previous coding efforts, before discussing its significance and potential contributions to the comparative legal literature, political science, and other research.

In this article, I question whether the widely endorsed functional demos views—like the “all affected interests” and “all subjected” approaches—adequately measure legitimacy in democratic inclusion. I argue that these views fall short of this task and propose an alternative criterion for evaluating electoral rights allocation. The “permanent disenfranchisement condition” asserts that electoral regulations leading to involuntary, permanent disenfranchisement are undemocratic. This condition challenges traditional exclusions based on factors like denizenship or mental illness. Age-based or residency requirements, however, remain permissible, as they do not imply inherent unfitness for political participation. Additionally, I introduce the “democratic ethos proviso,” which is less stringent and failure to fulfill it is less consequential. It stipulates that electoral regulations should be justifiable with reference to the specificities of the relevant democratic ethos.

Concerns about the use of online political microtargeting (OPM) by campaigners have arisen since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the international political arena. In addition to providing conceptual clarity on OPM and explore the use of such techniques in Europe, this paper seeks to empirically disentangle the differing behaviours of campaigners when they message citizens through microtargeted rather than non-targeted campaigning. More precisely, I hypothesise that campaigners use negative campaigning and are more diverse in terms of topics when they use OPM. To investigate whether these expectations hold true, I use text-as-data techniques to analyse an original dataset of 4,091 political Facebook Ads during the last national elections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Results show that while microtargeted ads might indeed be more thematically diverse, there does not seem to be a significant difference to non-microtargeted ads in terms of negativity. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for microtargeted campaigns and how future research could be conducted.

In recent years, there has been an increasing concern about non-governmental development organisations’ (NGDOs) sustainability especially in countries including Ghana that have transitioned into lower-middle-income status. The effect has been donor withdrawal and funding cuts for NGDOs. This presents opportunities and challenges for NGDOs in their attempt to mobilise alternative funding routes in ensuring their sustainability. Drawing on secondary literature and semi-structured interviews with fifty-seven respondents from national NGDOs, government, donors and corporate organisations, this article documents and expands our understanding of the different typologies of philanthropic institutions in Ghana as potential alternative funding routes for NGDOs. It finds that a weak enabling environment including the absence of a regulatory framework and fiscal incentives for domestic resource mobilisation stands to affect the potential of philanthropic institutions as alternative funding routes for NGDOs’ sustainability.

Fiji’s multi-ethnic society is historically characterised by low levels of inter-ethnic trust and a segregated civil society, typified by low participation of youth, the poor, ethnic minorities, and less literate members of society. How does this actually existing civil society shape the social transactions, value subjectivities, norms and habits of citizenship bred through volunteering and other forms of civic engagement in these contexts? Drawing on data from a mixed method study on youth volunteering in Fiji, this paper interrogates prevailing normative assumptions on volunteerism’s role in retooling civic renewal and citizenship. Being socially situated, the outcomes of youth volunteering vary. Specifically, youth volunteering in organisations that value inclusion has midwifed progressive citizenship values; while, participation in bonding type civil society reproduces exclusionary citizenship, social disparities and patterns of discrimination and privilege. The implication is that for volunteerism to produce desired progressive citizenship values and attitudes, civic organisations transmitting such values need to be specifically focussed on progressive goals.

Environmental activism organizations depend on recruiting and retaining individuals willing to engage in leadership tasks on a voluntary basis. This study examined the resources which help or hinder sustained environmental volunteer activist leadership behaviors. Interviews with 21 environmental volunteer activist leaders were analyzed within a Resource Mobilization Theory framework. While six resources supporting sustained engagement in volunteer activist leadership behaviors were identified, only three were sought by all participants: time, community support, and social relationships. Money, volunteers and network connections were considered valuable resources, however their acquisition generated significant additional administrative burdens. Social relationships sustained volunteer activist leaders through fostering feelings of positive emotions connected with the group. We conclude with suggestions for organizations seeking to increase retention of activist volunteer leaders: namely larger organizations sharing their resources to reduce administrative demands on volunteer activist leaders in smaller organizations; developing movement infrastructure groups to build and sustain networks; and the prioritization of positive relationships within volunteer teams.

This article presents a case of allotony based on the phonation of the vowel in Nuer, a Western Nilotic language; the falling tone is found only on modal vowels in this language, while the high level tone is found only on breathy vowels. We describe the phenomenon and present evidence suggesting that it may be due to the neutralization of two separate tonal contours, H and HL, conditioned by the phonation of the vowel. We place this phenomenon within the known typology of phonation-tone interaction and advance a proposal as to the phonetic factors behind its development.