Persistent concerns about loneliness and social isolation in later life have prompted increasing attention to the social and environmental factors that enable or constrain connection. Yet, while previous research has identified community and societal determinants of social connection, little is known about how these factors interact dynamically with individual and interpersonal circumstances to shape older adults’ lived connection experiences. This study addresses this knowledge gap by examining how older Australians perceive and experience environmental influences on their social connectedness, and how factors across multiple ecological levels work together to create or hinder opportunities for connection. Four focus groups were conducted with 15 participants, aged 60 years and over, from metropolitan and regional areas in New South Wales, Australia, to explore how participants described the role of different factors in their connection experiences. Participants identified a range of influences across individual, interpersonal, community and societal levels, including meaningful roles, community spaces, local businesses and transport accessibility. Three patterns of cross-level interaction were revealed: the interplay between personality and community infrastructure; the multi-level role of digital technology; and the cascading influence of policy frameworks shaping community participation opportunities. By uncovering how factors interact dynamically across social-ecological levels, this study advances understanding of the contexts that foster or constrain social connection in later life. The findings contribute to ongoing debates in social gerontology by demonstrating that loneliness and social isolation are best addressed through coordinated, multi-level interventions that align individual, community and policy environments to promote healthy ageing in place.

Diminishing civic vitality has been reported in numerous societies, irrespective of democratic maturity. Mandatory community service initiatives in schools have garnered attention as a strategy for fostering long-term civic engagement. However, methodological challenges such as selection bias and observation timing have led to inconsistent empirical results. This study leverages a unique natural experimental context where mandatory community service requirements were nationally implemented in middle and high schools in South Korea. Employing a non-parametric regression-discontinuity design, we provide robust evidence that such programs increase the likelihood of volunteering in adulthood among lower socioeconomic groups. We found no indications that these mandates increase or decrease the propensity for civic engagement among higher socioeconomic groups.

The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) since the 1970s has generated a wealth of research as to the causes and implications of the rise of this sector. Public awareness of NGOs and their activities has grown as well, at least in part due to increased media coverage of the organizations and the situations to which they respond. Although NGOs are not new to global polity, media attention to them as a sector only really began to take off in the 1990s. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of two international newspapers from 1985-2010, this study explores the legitimation process of NGOs and examines the role of categorization and labeling in this process. The results show that the establishment of a distinct label in the media served to propel cognitive recognition of NGOs, and that media coverage reflects changes in cognitive legitimacy over time.

Recent decades have seen a worldwide diffusion of electoral gender quotas, an institution designed to enhance women's political representation. This has sparked scholars’ interest in the actual effects of quotas, including their impact on female descriptive (numeric) representation in national legislatures. As with many other issues within the domain of comparative politics, however, establishing causality with respect to the effect of quota laws is intrinsically difficult. In this article, we attempt to overcome these difficulties. We apply the generalised synthetic control method to study the impact of legislated candidate quotas on the descriptive parliamentary representation of women in three European countries: Belgium, Greece and Poland. As these states elect their national parliaments by means of variants of a proportional representation system with preferential voting for candidates, we compare their levels of female descriptive representation to a set of corresponding figures observed for a ‘synthetic control’ unit, comprising 16 European countries that implement fundamentally similar electoral systems but do not have legislated candidate quotas in place. The quota effects that we obtain vary substantially among the three cases analysed. The apparent effect for Belgium is strong, while much weaker effects are observed for the two other states. Relying on the extant literature, we qualitatively interpret these results, putting forward a number of conjectures as to how contextual factors can contribute to the strength and persistence of quota effects. We conclude that the impact of legislated candidate quotas is essentially limited, albeit it may be magnified under favourable contextual conditions, such as those which occurred in Belgium.

While comparative research on nonprofit organizations has made much progress since the launch of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project in 1990, there now seems to be a loss of momentum. Some of the reasons for this have to do with aspects of definition, classification, and aggregation that can be corrected. The main issue, however, is the lack of progress in advancing comparative nonprofit sector theories beyond the social origins theory. To remedy this, the essay proposes four ways forward as part of a new research agenda.

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long‐standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within‐individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long term, with potential for short‐term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people's formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people's responses to trust questions are remarkably similar between surveys and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these appear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redistribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and attitude formation more broadly.

The European Union (EU) has become increasingly visible and contested over the past decades. Several studies have shown that domestic pressure has made the EU's ‘electorally connected’ institutions more responsive. Yet, we still know little about how politicisation has affected the Union's non‐majoritarian institutions. We address this question by focusing on agenda‐setting and ask whether and how domestic politics influences the prioritisation of legislative proposals by the European Commission. We argue that the Commission, as both a policy‐seeker and a survival‐driven bureaucracy, will respond to domestic issue salience and Euroscepticism, at party, mass and electoral level, through targeted performance and through aggregate restraint. Building on new data on the prioritisation of legislative proposals under the ordinary legislative procedure (1999–2019), our analysis shows that the Commission's choice to prioritise is responsive to the salience of policy issues for Europe's citizens. By contrast, our evidence suggests that governing parties’ issue salience does not drive, and Euroscepticism does not constrain, the Commission's priority‐setting. Our findings contribute to the literature on multilevel politics, shedding new light on the strategic responses of non‐majoritarian institutions to the domestic politicisation of ‘Europe’.

This article addresses the virtues of gold open access (OA) from the perspective of its impact on social science scholarly associations and their members. OA has clear and obvious virtues, including redistribution downward and outward of research findings. But it also has the potential for upward redistribution or narrowing of the realm of publication, which this author finds troubling. A central question is who will cover article processing charges. The article identifies five potential sources of the necessary funds or ways to reduce the funds that are necessary, and discusses problems with each in terms of likely gainers and losers. It also identifies two potential substantive concerns about the kinds of social science scholarship most amenable to OA. It concludes by observing that, as is often the case, an apparently narrow technological innovation opens large issues – organizationally, substantively, and even morally.

Orthographic representations are often derived from phonological analyses or representations, and can even lead to claims about phonological representations (Sproat 2000). In Armenian, many strings of orthographic consonants are broken up by schwas in pronunciation. As a grammatical process, this spelling-pronunciation mismatch is sensitive to a host of phonological, morphological, and morphophonological factors. I systematically catalog these factors, and this systematicity reinforces previous generative arguments that the orthographic form (without schwas) matches the underlying form (without schwas) (Vaux 1998). As for these factors, I argue that, phonologically, the epenthesis is triggered by directional syllabification and other syllabification-based constraints, including constraints on sibilant-stop contiguity (Itô 1989). Morphologically, epenthesis respects morpheme boundaries even when the boundary is semantically opaque, whether from prefixation, compounding, reduplication, or pseudo-reduplication. And from the morphophonology, there is evidence that epenthesis is simultaneously a phonological rule. It is an early lexical rule and it interacts opaquely with allomorphy and strata. Thus, this paper argues for a tight integration of orthographic, phonological, and morphological structures (cf. Boersma 2011; Hamann & Colombo 2017).

The extensive scholarship devoted to the congruence of mass-elite policy preferences lacks consensus about the meaning, comparison, and measurement across political settings. This makes comparisons difficult and raises obstacles to advancing the debates. This symposium aims to identify the diversity of methodological choices and to reflect systematically on several key choices of particular importance in understanding the congruence. The contributions to the symposium compare and contrast how several types of measurement fare in diverse political contexts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia, and what we can learn from those methodological choices.

We investigate how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) construct imaginaries of their premises, their local environment, and beyond. Based on a qualitative analysis of the websites of 209 randomly sampled NPOs in a metropolitan region in Central Europe, we find four distinct spatial imaginaries: (1) The world polity imaginary constructs NPOs as a part of a spatial environment that is neatly divided into nation states, supranational structures, and subnational units. (2) In the world society imaginary, NPOs are active in blurred, fluid, and overlapping spaces such as networks, commercialized spaces, or natural habitats. (3) In a religious imaginary, the material world is complemented by a transcendental realm and categorized into spaces of the sacred and the evil. (4) Finally, in a lococentric imaginary, NPOs construct a dichotomy between "home" and the alien rest of the world. Each of these spatial imaginaries conveys distinctive ways of situating the organization in their spatial environment and implies specific organizational practices and emotional enchantments of space.

DiCanio et al. (2020) (this volume) argue that San Martin Itunyoso Triqui has a morphophonological exchange (also called ‘polarity’), where morphemes are realized by switching feature values: e.g. the bare root [anĩɦ] ‘get dirty’ is realized as [anĩ:] in the 1s, while the root [ani:] ‘stop’ is 1s [amĩɦ]. In this Reply, I seek to clarify how the descriptive use of ‘exchange’ relates to and differs from its meaning in phonological theories. I also show that the issue of whether exchanges exist is highly theory-dependent. For SPE, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, and single-level parallelist OT with opacity mechanisms, the IT forms do not provide evidence for exchange mechanisms. In contrast, a version of OT that lacks opacity mechanisms probably cannot generate the IT forms without an exchange mechanism. Issues facing the analyst, such as how to prove that exchanges exist, and which apparent exchanges one should expect to observe, are also discussed.

Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) have recently gained notoriety for their aggressive, often violent, misogyny, yet incels were not always an antidemocratic social group. They thus pose a challenge for thinking about democracy and identity in (anonymous) digital environments: how can we create spaces for marginalized social groups while ensuring the resulting identities remain democratic? While many scholars point to technological affordances or corporate content moderation policies as providing some solutions, in this article I propose a more democratic approach. Drawing from incel wikis and archived forum posts from two early incel communities—IncelSupport and LoveShy—I argue that a community's social norms, and the moderation practices required to sustain them, are user-directed interventions that have outsized effects in shaping group identities in democratic ways.

Scholars have discovered remarkable inequalities in who gets represented in electoral democracies. Around the world, the preferences of the rich tend to be better represented than those of the less well‐off. In this paper, we use the most comprehensive comparative dataset of unequal representation available to answer why the poor are underrepresented. By leveraging variation over time and across countries, we study which factors explain why representation is more unequal in some places than in others. We compile a number of covariates examined in previous studies and use machine learning to describe which mechanisms best explain the data. Globally, we find that economic conditions and good governance are most important in determining the extent of unequal representation, and we find little support for hypotheses related to political institutions, interest groups or political behaviour, such as turnout. These results provide the first broadly comparative explanations for unequal representation.

Area-based initiatives are central government strategies for community development in particularly deprived urban areas. A core strategy in ABIs is to involve third-sector organizations through co-production. In these areas, the organized civil society is weak, and the public sector has special interests and a willingness to use resources. We ask: if and how can co-production be developed in areas with such power assymetries? Through documents and qualitative interviews, we examined seven ABIs in Norway. We find that managerial ability and coordination, autonomy of action, and, especially, the possession of resources are important dimensions for understanding the development of a co-productive relationship. In the ABIs, we find considerable interdependence between TSO and municipalities as both actors lack resources needed to fulfill their respective goals. This interdependence facilitated co-production.

Juridical ecumenism is a branch of ecclesionomology: the study of church law as a form of applied ecclesiology. It involves the comparative study of the laws and other regulatory entities of different ecclesial traditions and their institutional churches, as well as the practice of church law and ecumenism. It does not seek to replace the historic focus on theology and doctrine in ecumenical dialogue, but rather to remedy the missing legal link in the ecumenical enterprise to date, by using church laws as a rich unifying instrument for greater visible communion between separated institutional churches. One fruit of juridical ecumenism is the issue of the Statement of Principles of Christian Law by an Ecumenical Panel in 2016 and its launch at the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2022. Marking the 1700th anniversary of the great Council of Nicaea and its Canons gives us the opportunity to think critically, as an exercise in juridical ecumenism, about continuity and change over the centuries in the nature of church law. We can achieve this by comparing the Statement of Principles of Chistian Law (2016) issued by the Ecumenical Christian Law Panel with the Nicene Canons (325) issued by the first Ecumenical Council. This article explores the similarities and differences between these two juridical entities – in terms of their (1) nature, authority, and reception; (2) subject matter; (3) sources; (4) purposes; and (5) internal structure – and what the Nicene Canons and the Christian Law Principles tell us about these five aspects of church law itself. I conclude with reflections on the value of comparison for the future of juridical ecumenism.