This essay provides meta-ethical foundations for an approach to political realism. The foundations appeal to the kind of non-objectivity of morality involved in taking a critical and reflective perspective on our own moral and political outlooks. The essay argues that the distinctive methodology of an approach to political realism can be derived from these non-objectivist foundations. This methodology requires political philosophy to be more critical and reflective than it usually is, for it to be more deeply engaged with history, sociology, and other human sciences, and for it to look less like applied moral philosophy.

How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office‐holders. We study this issue using a between‐subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party‐political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame‐shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture.

This article uses Arash Abizadeh to illustrate the appeal and difficulties of the claim that random selection is a more democratic way to select a legislature than election. It agrees with Abizadeh that representative democracy cannot be reduced to the right of voters to choose their legislators. However, it challenges his view that elections are inherently inegalitarian because they enable voters to discriminate unfairly among electoral candidates and his assimilation of gyroscopic to descriptive representation. Finally, the article highlights the difficulties of justifying random selection while rejecting election on egalitarian grounds. It therefore concludes that democratic equality requires more, not less, attention to the ethics of voting and to the conceptual, moral, and political dimensions of citizens’ claims on elected office.

Statecraft, under democratic principles in Tanzania in particular, is often considered as a total heritage from former colonial masters. Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922–1999) disputed this by advancing an African theory of democracy, articulated to inform modern statecraft in Tanzania. His theory advances a form of democracy characterized by a merger of some practices from the African past and others from the western world. In this way, he articulated the centrality of democracy in organizing public affairs without compromising its African origin but also acknowledging the influence of other democratic cultures in the modern organization of a polity. This article articulates Nyerere's contribution to African democratic discourse and the extent to which his theory of democracy is relevant in the organization of contemporary politics and democratic trajectories in Tanzania and Africa in particular.

Italy was the first Western country to be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within it, immigrants have played an important role as essential workers and throughout solidarity initiatives. The present article is based on 64 in-depth interviews with immigrants who engaged in solidarity actions directed toward the immigrant population and the host society during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analytically, it emerged that through solidaristic initiatives, immigrants articulated what we called ‘claims of recognition.’ Recognition here is considered in both its individual form, as interpersonal acceptance and esteem for single immigrants, and its collective form, as the social regard of immigrant groups as constituents of Italian society. Despite being perhaps 'elementary,' these claims aim to fight forms of both non-recognition and mis-recognition that are pervasive in Italy and aim to transform the symbolic 'fabric' of this country.

Empirical literature regarding which actors support the most participatory democracy is surprisingly scarce. Discussing the core ideological features of populist and post-materialist-centred parties, we expect that these parties emphasise participatory democracy more than their competitors. Additionally, populist parties should embody a monist demand for greater participatory democracy, while post-materialist-centred (PMC) parties should advocate a pluralist understanding of it. Drawing on party electoral manifestos, we verify these assumptions in several national elections across Europe. Our findings show mixed support for the theoretical expectations. Both post-materialist and populist parties support participatory democracy more than other parties, and their principles diverge. More precisely, our data confirm that PMC parties advocate a pluralist understanding of participatory democracy. Yet populist parties show a fuzzier picture. While populist radical right parties exhibit a monist profile, radical left populist parties are much more in line with post-materialist arguments.

This paper’s objective was to reveal the Hungarian population’s knowledge and attitude about international volunteering. The study compared the opinion of returned volunteers with that of those population groups that had no international volunteering experiences and drew conclusions about the similarities and differences. The article aimed to evaluate the perceived roles and impacts of volunteering as well as the experienced difficulties and challenges. The study evaluated the results of a quantitative online survey collecting the opinion of 344 respondents including 73 returned international volunteers. The sampling used was convenient and non-representative; however, efforts were made to contact respondents with various demographic background and volunteer-related experiences. Detailed SPSS-based factor and cluster analyses were used to identify homogeneous groups for data comparison. The general awareness about international volunteering is low in Hungary, still most of the respondents agree with its ideology. The positive effects of volunteering imposed on the volunteers’ persons were named as the most important advantage but only few respondents found it beneficiary for the donor country or its economy. Returned volunteers were challenged by local cultural habits as well as project management difficulties in the recipient countries. Strong correlations were experienced in the opinion of women, university graduates, and respondents with domestic volunteering background, all of them having significantly bigger knowledge and understanding level compared to those of other segment groups.

There are many ways of quantifying the success of political science departments, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. The most relevant international rankings consider factors such as research quality, research quantity, or academic reputation. None of the established rankings consider how frequently departments place their alumni into the academic job market. As this criterion should arguably be among the most important ones for prospective graduate students, this paper analyzes original data on the educational background of faculty members (N = 3548) at highly reputable political science departments in North America and Europe to create an up-to-date ranking based on academic placement records. The insights from this article provide guidance to undergraduate and graduate students when considering different options for the pursuit of a Ph.D., and hopefully also motivate departments to place greater significance on their placement records through increased transparency. In addition, the data highlights the large gender gap in placement success across all departments.

A growing ageing population in Taiwan poses serious challenges to care-giving services, especially for the Indigenous population, who experience health disparities and insufficient care-giving resources. The Taiwan government implemented universal long-term care (LTC) services in the early 2000s, aiming to alleviate LTC resource disparities in rural regions, including major Indigenous areas. However, empirical research on LTC generally suggests that gaps and challenges remain between policy implementation goals and Indigenous cultural values that may undermine the effectiveness of implementation. This article investigates this problem by asking: Why do implementation challenges persist for LTC services for Indigenous older adults in rural Taiwan? The study employs a multi-method case study of adult foster care (AFC) to investigate this question with a decolonizing perspective. This research selected AFC facilities as study sites because of their strengths in home settings and cultural embeddedness. Empirical data include participant observation (n = 500 hours) at five AFC facilities across five rural Indigenous villages of Taiwan, supplemental interviews (n = 4), and public legal and regulatory documents, analysed through thematic coding. The findings underscore inherent tensions between LTC policy and Indigenous cultural values in Taiwan around safety, scientific metrics of care and market competition that persisted even in an LTC model that emphasizes cultural embeddedness and local community (i.e. AFC). These government priorities contradict the values of Indigenous care that emphasize belonging and solidarity. Centring cultural context and creating communal participatory spaces is one crucial solution to prevent incompatibilities and hegemony in service towards Indigenous older adults.

Even when subject to comparable exogenous constraints during the Eurozone crisis and in its immediate aftermath, governments in Southern Europe have pursued distinct labour market reform agendas. What room for manoeuvre did governments of crisis‐struck peripheral countries really have in shaping their labour market reform strategies, and how can we account for the observed variation? We address these questions by making a twofold contribution to the debate on the political economy of austerity in the Eurozone periphery. First, through the first systematic analysis of all labour market and collective bargaining (CB) reforms implemented in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece over 2009–2019, we identify those elements of core labour market deregulation common across Southern European countries (namely, the loosening of employment protection for workers on open‐ended contracts and the decentralisation of CB to the firm level); and those elements of variation, both cross‐country and cross‐party, in the content of corollary labour market interventions that accompanied this core deregulation. Second, we explain these similarities and variations in reform outcomes as the product of the interaction of two factors: economic constraints and electoral dynamics. We argue that the implementation of the common core of deregulation is linked to the exogenous pressure to improve export competitiveness to which Southern European countries have been subjected since the crisis. Through the combination of survey data analysis and qualitative evidence, we then show empirically how the variation in the corollary measures accompanying deregulation is linked to the class composition of the electoral social blocs Southern European partisan governments rely on or aim to assemble. Based on this analysis, we identify four ideal‐typical labour market reformist strategies attempted by Southern European governments during the decade of the Great Recession. The analysis highlights that although domestic politics plays a crucial role in shaping structural adjustment under crisis conditions, not all reform strategies are equally viable within the framework of Economic and Monetary Union.

The article discusses contemporary Polish ‘right to the city’ movements and their potential for creating change, described here as the potential for ‘alternative modernization’, a term rooted in the alterglobalist movement. The waning of the latter’s energy has fostered the emergence of local movements focused on protest and reform. In Poland, both an historical anti-urbanity and monologic patterns of regime transformation (the latter producing the ‘anti-city’) have become points of reference for urban movements and their demand for alternative patterns of modernization, called here altermodernization. The altermodernist model focuses, among other things, on discourses and praxis of decommodification, institutional reform and visions of a ‘well-organized city’. The article is primarily a product of desk research and the author’s own materials based on in-depth interviews collected in six Polish cities as well as participant observation and content analysis.

Partnerships between international and local NGOs (INGOs and LNGOs) have often been analysed using principal–agent theory, where INGOs treat LNGOs as implementing agents and control their actions. The paper examines how LNGOs can improve their agency in these relationships to create more equal partnerships and thus greater local ownership. We propose a framework in which LNGOs can draw on material, organizational and ideational sources of power to improve their agency. The framework is applied to a case of a peacebuilding project in Nigeria’s farmer–herder conflict. The project was run by an INGO in partnership with two Nigerian LNGOs. The LNGOs had rather different experiences of the partnership. The paper argues that these are explained by differences in their organizational power and how this power was enhanced by ideational power. Material power mattered, but did not play a central role. The findings show that LNGOs can enhance their positions in partnerships if they have effective internal policies and procedures, local and contextual knowledge, and can frame these strategically.

One of the structural problems of introductory lectures is that students’ learning progress is primarily assessed by taking a final exam. Weekly preparation and reading are driven only by self-motivation. Can a student’s decision to complete her weekly assignments be influenced by a simple reminder? In a pre-registered experimental design, we test if personalised reminders from the instructor delivered via text messages contribute to learning outcomes. We assess formative learning via regular quizzes at the beginning of each class, and summative learning via grades in a final exam. We do not find statistically significant differences in learning outcomes, and discuss how design features potentially drive this result. In the conclusion, we stress the importance of experimental design in assessing innovative and new learning techniques.

This article assesses the constraints and capacities for Canadian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to enhance economic democracy. Constraints include the democratic deficit produced by the commercialization of SOEs, which shifted away from historically privileging the social outcomes of public enterprise, together with the construction of a global governance architecture with binding and enforceable trade agreements that constrain democratic decision-making and state activity. Capacities include opportunities for SOEs to address deleterious economic outcomes through a rejuvenation of the socially oriented public enterprise tradition in areas of vexing policy concern. The article argues that SOEs can be an important component of enhanced extended state democracy through their redistributive outcomes that provide non-market income support for social infrastructure and services.

Contemporary governance increasingly emphasizes cross-sector collaboration to address complex societal challenges. This article examines how state strategies approach cross-sector collaborations involving the third sector, and delves into the interplay of authoritative, competitive, and collaborative governance strategies within these policies. Motivated by concerns about child poverty and social exclusion, the Declaration on Leisure Activities exemplifies Norway's reliance on partnerships between government, municipalities, and third sector organizations in the leisure and culture policy field. Employing a qualitative document analysis, the study reveals both potentials and paradoxes inherent in these approaches, offering valuable insights for designing effective cross-sector policies and navigating the complexities of cross-sector collaboration.

Research confronting inequality in volunteering has mostly focused on the attribution of its benefits to different groups and communities, with little attention paid towards fundamental factors that shape such inequalities and how these intersect with volunteering opportunities. This paper highlights the importance of volunteering for young refugees in Uganda, as a means of both learning new skills and earning a livelihood. However, evidence suggests that not everyone has equal access to these opportunities, with inequalities primarily distributed along the lines of language, gender and education. The paper provides a critical examination of the kinds of volunteering organised and promoted by state actors and civil society organisations with a particular focus on access to volunteering opportunities and the ways they can produce inequalities among young people. Based on data drawn from a study among young refugees from South Sudan, Burundi, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in four settings in Uganda, the paper explores issues of access to opportunities as a core premise around which these inequalities are shaped. It demonstrates that rather than address social inequality, the obfuscation of these experiences in how volunteering is organised only serves to reinforce the status quo.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a seemingly high level of unity amongst Europeans in support of Ukraine. However, this article uncovers some inter- and intra-country fault-lines in public opinion across and within 16 EU countries and the UK regarding pro-Ukraine aid initiatives by using a two-wave design with data from the EUI-YouGov survey conducted in April and September 2022. Findings show that support is relatively stable but varies a lot depending on the specific measure and between countries. We uncover lowest support for measures that go against the self-interest of Europeans such as deploying troops and accepting higher energy costs. Frontrunners of Ukraine support are geographically close to Russia and located in both Western and Eastern Europe (though not exclusively), whereas laggards are countries of Eastern and Southern Europe with a history of Russian ties during the Cold War. Yet within countries, Ukraine support does not follow a simple pre-determined ideological pattern of the left and right. Most countries with lower overall support for Ukraine display a higher level of polarization between supporters of the incumbent versus the opposition party. Understanding these fault-lines is important for insights on current and future levels of Ukraine aid across Europe.

Intense vortices have been observed within large-scale bushfires, and have been likened to “fire tornadoes”. This paper presents a simple mathematical model of such an event, and is based on a Boussinesq approximation relating temperature and density in the air. A linearized model is derived under the assumption that the temperature varies only slightly from ambient, and a solution to that model is presented in closed form. The nonlinear equations are solved in axisymmetric geometry, using a semi-numerical approach based on Fourier–Bessel series. The nonlinear and linearized results are in good agreement for small temperature excursions above ambient, but when larger deviations occur, nonlinear effects cause a type of flow reversion within the fire vortex. The cause of this effect is discussed in the paper.