Churches have a hard time defending their moral values in the political sphere of an ever more secular and liberal Western Europe. A largely neglected means of navigating this crisis is through the Church’s role as a charitable provider during the implementation of morality policies. This paper examines this type of church involvement from a cross-national and cross-sectoral perspective. We describe the activities of Protestant churches in four morality policy areas in three European countries: Germany, England, and Denmark. The variation in religious engagement observed in these areas and countries appear to be driven by the churches’ room to maneuver and their policy congruence with state goals, whereas governance capacities are secondary. Thus, the provision of social services can still serve as a means by which Protestant churches can exert moral authority, especially if these social services are related to moral issues.

Scholarship on volunteering has paid insufficient attention to how experiences of volunteering in the past affect current and future participation. The importance of this relationship is emphasized by the introduction of public policies across the globe focusing on national service programmes and community service in schools with the underlying intention of inducing ongoing pro-social behavior. Using the UK longitudinal data, this article analyzes the prevalence of persistent individual volunteering behavior over the life-course, and most importantly, the extent to which past volunteering has a causal influence on current and future participation. Strong evidence of this relationship is provided, suggesting that volunteer-stimulating policy measures—such as the UK government’s National Citizen Service initiative for all young people between 16 and 17 years of age—will have a more profound effect because they do not only affect current volunteering activities but are also likely to induce a permanent change in favor of volunteering.

The government of the Communist Party of China (CPC) rolled out a national policy to contract out social and welfare services to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in 2013. This study explores how government contracting of services affects NGOs. We examine three areas: marketization, financial dependency, and autonomy. We find significant convergence of the effects of contracting on NGOs in China with NGOs’ experiences in liberal democratic countries, despite divergent political regimes. Found effects are explained by the combination of the authoritarian government of the CPC with the neoliberal governance structures introduced by contracting. Convergence with international experience despite divergent political regimes is attributed to the neoliberal essence of the policy of contracting of services.

This article adds a much needed microlevel perspective to the literature on interactions between civil society organizations and governments. I argue that a microlevel perspective assists in making connections between two dominant streams in the literature on government–CSO relations: an empirical–analytical stream and a critical stream. It aims to better understand the interactions and relations, by analysing the institutional work done by CSOs’ members. Adopting this approach puts CSO members in a more agentic position. Interactional processes are brought to the centre of analysis. The Dutch Community Sport Coach programme was used as a case to illustrate the usefulness of the approach. Through a one-year organizational ethnography, the article scrutinizes the way in which members of one CSO enact the organization’s service delivery relationship with a municipality. Through a multidimensional perspective on agency, the analysis shows how individual CSO members act as embedded agents that assimilate a public logic into the dominant community logic. It further shows the CSO’s members efforts and struggle to maintain their community logic. The article argues that an analysis of the microfoundations of government–civil society organization relations foregrounds the multivocality of the relationship as foundational.

Ecological economics research on limits to growth has demonstrated that high-income countries are unlikely to succeed in ‘making growth green’ or, in other words, decoupling economic growth from ecological impacts fast enough to bring human activity back within planetary boundaries. At the European Union (EU) level, a paradigm shift is difficult because the EU’s socioeconomic system is growth dependent: the continuation of economic growth is required to avoid significant psychological, social and economic harms. This article argues that the EU founding treaties entrench this growth-dependent model by constraining the policy reforms proposed by ecological economists to reduce the EU economy’s reliance on growth. It therefore contends that treaty reform is necessary if the EU is to sustain human wellbeing without continued economic growth. Nevertheless, the article also finds in the treaties a limited degree of flexibility towards policies that would constitute first steps in the direction of growth independence.

Often institutional solutions such as structures and organisations are seen as best practices in neighbourhood renewal. Using empirical case study data from the Netherlands and the UK, this paper demonstrates that there should be more attention for the role of individual urban practitioners. The relevance of this conclusion goes beyond the domain of neighbourhood regeneration alone. Due to the new government policy paradigms (e.g. Big Society/Participation Society), welfare reforms are introduced that combine severe austerity measures with more responsibilities for individual citizens and cross-sectorial partnerships between institutions. This post-crisis participation society calls for individuals that are able to ‘make a difference’ by bridging the gap between the systems of government agencies and other institutions, and the lifeworld of residents. But what are the characteristics and working methods of highly effective ‘exemplary urban practitioners’? This paper explores the characteristics of these practitioners by analysing empirical data from neighbourhood renewal case studies using Habermas system/lifeworld concept.

This article defends a set of three apparently mutually inconsistent claims and shows how they can and should be simultaneously held. First, that one of the most pressing normative problems we face is constituted by the wealth of opportunities for transnational domination—of states by other states, of states and individuals by supranational organizations and institutions as well as transnational corporations, of vulnerable individuals by powerful ones. Second, the most appropriate way to tackle this issue, far from being the implementation of a cosmopolitan agenda, is the strengthening of states and their problem-solving capacities. Third, this agenda toward the (re-)strengthening of states requires a demanding form of transnational solidarity, if one that significantly differs from more traditional liberal notions of cosmopolitan solidarity.

This article contrasts the liberal idea of a “sleeping sovereign” with the democratic one of a “sovereign awakened.” The right to protest is defended as an expression of popular sovereignty, envisaged as a right to popular “self-awakening” instigated by an imperative call of duty not reducible to a set of liberal individual rights. In contrast to some approaches of agonistic democracy, it is argued that democratically breaking the rules of the game of liberal democracy is an indispensable dimension of democratic protest. Taking into account Étienne Balibar's thoughts about a rule-breaking right to have rights, it is suggested we revisit the French Constitution of 1793, in which a popular duty to insurrection is enshrined. The article ends with the proposal to supplement insurrectionary accounts of sovereignty with a Gramscian view that would insist on the necessity of hegemonically constructing a democratic “collective will.”

As welfare states are increasingly challenged and replaced by welfare mix models, new ideas about the functions of non-profit and voluntary organisations (NPVOs) provoke political conflicts that should be reflected in research. This paper explores the significance of political and ideological dimensions to present changes in the Swedish welfare state regarding NPVOs as welfare services providers. Investigating both national and local level, the study addresses political as well as practical implications of the reframing of NPVOs as service providers rather than being associated with a voice function. The article shows extensive differences between national and local levels as contentious ideological cleavages at national level are dormant in local level politics. Variations in the way relations to NPVOs are structured in practice at local level appear related to factors other than political dimensions. The findings support the development of an analytical framework that reflects political dimensions and allow for empirical focus that includes national and local level politics and practices.

This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan’s Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositions by institutional means, and to explaining the performance of opposition parties with the prevailing institutional resources and constraints. Specifically, attempts at institutionalizing a predominant power status carry particular risks of generating inverse effects, including increased political vulnerability. However, there are no automatic effects. Rather, as the Turkish experience suggests, reasonably vigorous actors to become politically relevant must seize the particular (if usually limited) opportunities arising from advanced institutional autocratization.

Previous studies have shown that social enterprises can improve the health conditions of socially disadvantaged people through qualitative approaches. As income-related health inequality has grown, the role of social enterprises in addressing this issue has become more significant. This study examined whether social enterprises could positively affect the self-rated health of South Korean low-income residents using multilevel models. The results showed that government-certified social enterprises were associated with positive self-rated health among low-income residents. On the other hand, preliminary social enterprises with insufficient profitability and weak corporate governance showed mixed results. Based on the empirical results, this study suggests relevant policy implications.

Anthropology meets democratic theory in this conversation that explores indigeneity, diversity, and the potentialities of democratic practices as exist in the non-Western world. Wade Davis draws readers into the ethnosphere—the sum total of human knowledge and experience—to highlight the extinction events that are wiping out some half of human ethnic diversity. Gagnon worries over what is lost to how we can understand and practice democracy in this unprecedented, globally occurring, ethnocide.

Volunteering provides unique benefits to organisations, recipients, and potentially the volunteers themselves. This umbrella review examined the benefits of volunteering and their potential moderators. Eleven databases were searched for systematic reviews on the social, mental, physical, or general health benefits of volunteering, published up to July 2022. AMSTAR 2 was used to assess quality and overlap of included primary studies was calculated. Twenty-eight reviews were included; participants were mainly older adults based in the USA. Although overlap between reviews was low, quality was generally poor. Benefits were found in all three domains, with reduced mortality and increased functioning exerting the largest effects. Older age, reflection, religious volunteering, and altruistic motivations increased benefits most consistently. Referral of social prescribing clients to volunteering is recommended. Limitations include the need to align results to research conducted after the COVID-19 pandemic. (PROSPERO registration number: CRD42022349703).

This essay, based on the 2025 SHGAPE Presidential Address, considers the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of “baby murderers.” It examines the dilemmas that newspaper reporters, local authorities, medical experts, and ordinary citizens confronted as they wrestled with the problem of young children who killed. How could one distinguish an accident from an intentional act? At what ages did children understand the consequences of their actions? When were they old enough to grasp the finality of death? Could murderous tendencies be nipped in the bud? Were homicidal impulses inherited, the result of deficient parenting, or the fault of a corrupt environment? Were baby murderers mentally ill, morally deficient, or just plain evil? Did the law sufficiently deter perpetrators and protect potential victims? These questions acquired special resonance in the late nineteenth century, a time that preceded the establishment of separate juvenile justice systems but one in which the right to a protected childhood had gained increasing (but by no means universal) acceptance. The Gilded Age, then, offers a particularly rich vantage point from which to view how various popular definitions of childhood intersected and clashed with medical understandings and legal procedures.

Social innovation (SI) solves social problems. What features distinguish NGOs that are experienced in implementing SI? This article employs a survey of a representative sample of 400 rural NGOs from Poland to highlight certain features that distinguish NGOs with experience implementing SI among the following: (1) cooperation with other organisations and public institutions; (2) the involvement of rural inhabitants in activities intended to solve their social problems; and (3) human and financial resources. NGOs implementing SI are distinguished by features (1) and (3). The results are interpreted in the context of rural NGO activities in the postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Since the pandemic, older adults have become more willing to adopt video calling to stay connected with loved ones. Prior research indicates that video-mediated communication has the potential to facilitate perceived closeness to interaction partners, but may present difficulties for older adults of advanced ages in terms of usability and accessibility, challenging them to benefit as much from the distance-reducing properties of video calling as younger older adults. However, the video-calling experiences of those aged 75+ and the specific conditions enabling them to overcome medium-related challenges, especially in informal settings, have remained relatively unexplored. This study aimed to gain deeper understanding of the circumstances that shape perceptions of distance and closeness during the video-mediated interactions of this age group. Using grounded theory analysis of 108 interviews, it identified five key properties and three roles ascribed to video-mediated communication, revealing that respondents’ perceptions of distance and proximity were contingent upon their appraisals of video calling’s properties in light of their broader emotional, relational and interactional contexts. The findings confirm video calling’s potential to reduce perceived distance in the informal encounters of individuals aged 75+. Nevertheless, fear of substitution of in-person contacts may overshadow video calling’s positive aspects, undermining any perceived closeness to interaction partners. By unveiling the mechanisms central to empowering or impeding these individuals in navigating medium-related challenges and overcoming perceived distance during video-mediated interactions, this article sheds light on the age-related specificity of their video-calling experiences and offers valuable starting points for developing strategies to help them benefit fully from video-mediated social-interaction opportunities.

This article examines a decade of charity law review processes in six jurisdictions—Australia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales and Ireland. Using a life-cycle basis viewed through a functional comparative lens, it examines review terms of reference, stakeholder involvement in public consultations, report recommendations and governmental responses. The article compares post-review recommendation implementation across government-owned and independent review processes. In identifying areas most open to and most difficult to reform (including charity definition and advocacy) and probing the hidden state/non-profit sector tensions that underlie such reform attempts, this article provides new insights for future review processes.

Democracy and liberal democracy, in particular, are at a turning point and the European Union constitutes a fertile ground to study this phenomenon. Although there have been many studies on the crises of democracy, this article aims to make a contribution by concentrating on the nature of the dissensus over liberal democracy. While there is a broad academic consensus that dissensus is “the essence of politics” (Rancière, 2010), it has been rarely studied per se. This is precisely the ambition of this article: to understand the growing dissensus over liberal democracy, or put differently, the lack of consensus over liberal democracy. This article proposes an empirical definition of dissensus supported by a typology of ideal types. The article is organised as follows: Section 2 depicts the phenomenon under consideration and questions whether dissensus can be studied through the lenses of well-established concepts in political science, namely opposition and contestation. Section 3 proposes an empirical definition of dissensus as well as a typology, both coined to enable researchers to understand how the nature of the conflict over liberal democracy and the heterogeneity of actors’ goals can lead to four types of dissensus: mild, constructive, disruptive and destructive. These four ideal-types are then explained and illustrated by concrete examples in references to the principles of liberal democracy and its practice.

The INGO Accountability Charter is the only global, cross-sectoral regulatory initiative for international NGOs. This is the first independent study of perceptions of its effectiveness, based upon 26 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key individuals from 11 leading international NGOs. Firstly, it analyzes interviewees’ beliefs about the motivations of NGOs in joining the Charter. The findings contribute to the scholarly debate about the key drivers for voluntary regulation between ‘club theorists’ and ‘constructivists’ by demonstrating that NGO behavior in this regard is both self-interested and norm-guided. Secondly, it investigates the extent to which the interviewees believe that the Charter has been effective in enhancing the accountability of its members. Their responses further underline the applicability of club theory and constructivist explanations of NGO behavior, and lead to several policy recommendations about the future direction of Charter.