There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations. It involves (1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors’ possibilities; (2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value bases; and (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation.

This article introduces the Special Issue examining the growing dissensus over liberal democracy in the EU. While the early twenty-first century appeared to herald democratic triumph following the Cold War and the democratization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, recent decades have witnessed an increasing contestation of liberal democracy. The Special Issue explores this phenomenon and aims to understand the nature of the current dissensus over liberal democracy, the roles of different actors, and its implications for EU policies and instruments. Dissensus is defined as a conflict between different types of actors, either about the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and rights or their implementation through specific policies, or both. This article explains the puzzle and situates the concept of dissensus in the literature. It then discusses how dissensus can be studied as the dependent and independent variable and provides an overview of how the contributions in this issue address these questions. The Special Issue examines how this dissensus shapes both policies and polity in the EU context, particularly as it coincides with the growing success of radical and populist parties at the national level and increasing centralization of powers among executives at the EU level.

Successive crisis in Europe have contributed to rethink welfare state and the entrepreneurial role of Third Sector organizations in the provision of community services that progressively have created social enterprises. Its creation is the result of a decision-making process that is collective, not individual, and of a strategic nature, in which the organization's culture plays a relevant role. This work aims to describe and analyze the entrepreneurial process, and the key elements that determines the decision of creating a work insertion social enterprise by its promotor entity. As a result, this article proposes an explicative model of social enterprises creation and makes an empirical validation, using Delphi Method in Spanish work insertion social enterprises case.

We present a research model of extra-role behavior, integrating the literature on public service motivation (PSM) with stewardship theory. We propose that the extent to which volunteers perform activities that go beyond role prescription depends on the individual’s PSM. Our research model is further grounded in the notion that a stewardship-oriented organizational culture serves as a means to enhance the effect of PSM on extra-role behavior. We empirically test this research model in a sample of 475 Austrian and German volunteer firefighters and provide evidence that PSM positively relates to extra-role behavior at the 10% significance level. Furthermore, firefighters’ commitment to the occupation and organization positively moderates the relationship between PSM and extra-role behavior. We also find that stewardship-like characteristics, such as a motivating work design and perceived organizational support, directly relate to extra-role behavior. Implications for research and practice are discussed, focusing on the relevance of these insights for volunteerism research and management.

The middle class is considered the most relevant group for formal volunteering. However, the middle class is shrinking, raising the question of the consequences for volunteering in general. Based on four samples of the Swiss Volunteering Survey from 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2019 containing over 5′000 individual responses, we test whether the intensity of middle-class volunteering changes over time. Our results show that the middle class is an essential source for formal volunteering compared to other parts of society, especially those with lower income. The relationship between the middle class and volunteering is positive, though non-significant in our samples. We found no significant changes over time in the volunteering development of the middle class.

We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre‐stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for the view that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. Moreover, reactions were largely homogeneous across those groups that could potentially relate distantly to government authorities.

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.

The relationship between party system fragmentation and voter turnout is a long-standing phenomenon, the form of which has not yet been precisely defined. Using data from the Round 10 of European Social Survey (2020–2022), this article attempts to investigate the relationship across European democracies. Consistently with previous research, association between party system fragmentation as well as increase in number of parties between elections and turnout seems to be negative but rather weak. However, as could be expected based on a rational choice theory and cognitive overload, the effect depends on several individual and context level characteristics. The results suggest that negative effect of fragmentation may be attenuated by a high degree of partisanship. On the other hand, it may be strengthened in the context of an unanchored party system, as demonstrated in the case of Eastern and Central Europe compared to Western Europe, or by lower levels of political polarization.

Two maladies that have been incipient in Liberal Democracy since its birth have finally struck at once. The “tyranny of the majority” and “administrative despotism”—first identified by Alexis de Tocqueville almost two centuries ago—have combined in the form of a new, much more threatening democratic mutation. We are witnessing the rise of “despotic majoritarianism,” in which citizens are simultaneously given less and less say in the political process, just as more and more is being done in their name. This new strain of democratic disease threatens not just the United States but societies across Europe, Latin America, and South Asia. This article explores the nature of despotic majoritarianism, its manifestation today, and how we might combat it.

One of the key elements of constraint-based formalisms is their ability to derive a variety of effects from the interaction of general constraints. As for vowel harmony, one persistent question within Optimality Theory is how to encode directionality - directly through directional harmony-driving constraints, or indirectly through asymmetric prominence patterns. This paper presents a typologically unusual case of progressive harmony triggered by prefixes in Tutrugbu. We compare analyzing harmony as purely progressive in a direct sense with an indirect analysis that motivates harmony from initial-syllable prominence. Based on both language-internal and typological evidence, we argue that the prominence-based analysis is superior. We generalize to suggest that progressive harmony should always be reducible to independent factors, and as a result, formalized indirectly through prominence.

We propose a method for computing generating functions of genus-zero invariants of a gauged linear sigma model (GLSM) $(V, G, \theta, w)$. We show that certain derivatives of I-functions of quasimap invariants of $[V\mathbin{/\mkern-6mu/}_\theta G]$ produce I-functions (appropriately defined) of the GLSM. When G is an algebraic torus, we obtain an explicit formula for an I-function, and check that it agrees with previously computed I-functions in known special cases. Our approach is based on a new construction of these invariants that applies whenever the evaluation maps from the moduli space are proper, and includes insertions from light marked points, which may collide with each other and with basepoints.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) often find themselves under pressure to invest all of their available income in mission-related activities rather than in capacity building. We investigate one factor that can influence the decision to invest in such capacity-building tasks: funding sources pursued by an organization. Drawing on the benefits theory of nonprofit finance, we take these funding sources as predetermined by an organization’s mission and propose an extension of the theory by linking it to economic multitasking theory, which states that organizations prioritize tasks that offer greater and more measurable rewards. Through regression analyses of survey data from Swiss nonprofits, we analyze the extent to which funding sources sought affect the amount of effort invested in three areas of capacity building: public relations, impact focus, and resource attraction parameters. The results support the predictions of multitasking theory by showing that the effort invested in certain capacity-building tasks is affected considerably by seeking a specific funding source. The effects are stronger for resource attraction-related tasks than for tasks closer to the service delivery of NPOs. The results indicate that an organization’s mission affects not only the available funding sources but also the extent to which an organization invests in its capacities, which can lead to a ‘lock-in’ status for organizations.

This article explores a feminist chronopolitics of care through tracing the (missing) links between care, time and democracy. In democratic and care theories, temporalities have mostly been theorized regarding duration and speed. To extend this limited understanding of democratic and caring temporalities, the article draws on feminist theories of time to theorize the temporalities of care. Drawing on the concept of caring democracy, which centers dependencies and caring relationships, the article expands its limited temporal understanding. The emphasis on the temporalities of care challenges hegemonic temporal regimes based on linear clock-time in capitalist societies. Instead, it proposes reflecting on the multiple temporalities of care and integrating them into democratic processes. This might allow for a move toward a gender- and time-just caring democracy through what I propose to call feminist chronopolitics.

Scholars of nationalism in the Arab Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have focused mainly on its spokespeople from among state officials, military officers, and intellectuals. These groups were shaped by European colonialism, modernization, the expansion of education, and state formation, and aspired to achieve national independence and constitutionalism. Little attention was paid to religious scholars (ulema) because they were largely perceived as gatekeepers of the traditional imperial order who had, in the modern era, lost their influence and status. Focusing mainly on Egypt and Syria, this article seeks to contest the prevailing paradigm by highlighting the contribution of ulema to the fostering of ethnic identities in premodern times, and re-examining their place in the emerging national discourse in the Arab Middle East.

In this article, we argue that current societal struggles about whether and how eco-social policy and politics should be implemented to tackle the interlinked challenges of climate change and inequality are an expression of the main societal conflict of our times: the social-ecological transformation conflict. We identify four lines of conflict in the social-ecological transformation and explore how they are related to classes and mentalities. In the theoretical part, we conceptualize classes in social space and mentalities through a Bourdieusian relational approach. We also discuss the location of the four lines of conflict in social space. In the empirical part, we analyze survey data from Germany. Firstly, we find eight mentalities among respondents reflecting their views on various eco-social topics. Secondly, we construct the social space with socio-economic variables for the economic and cultural capital of the respondents. Thirdly, we plot the mentalities in the social space. The results show that the cultural middle class is in favor of eco-social policy, while the upper class and the economic middle class prefer green growth and ecological modernization. The lower-class fractions are skeptical of any transformation because they distrust institutions and cannot bear the transformation costs.

We study causes and consequences of financial management in households in the specific case of charitable giving. We test hypotheses using couples in the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Study (n = 1,101). We find that more relationship specific investments lead to deciding on charitable giving as one economic actor. Furthermore, we find that the partner with the highest relative educational resources has most decision making power over charitable donations. Separately deciding couples are smallest charitable donors. Households in which the male partner decides are largest charitable donors when only larger and more structural donations are considered. This can be explained by their more conservative religious denomination.

This article identifies three central axes in the contemporary constellation of democratic theory and practice: (1) redefining the roots of democratic power, or kratos, in response to new challenges to popular participation in democracy; (2) the rescaling of the demos given the growing dissatisfaction with liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global democracy; and (3) the de-parochialization of democracy within a multipolar world in light of democratic erosion in liberal democracies across Europe and the Americas. This article arrives at these axes by way of revisiting the relation of the two concepts constituting democracy's etymological roots—demos and kratos—in recent work in democratic theory. It concludes by urging to move beyond the post-Cold War social imaginary by exploring the question “What demos and kratos for the twenty-first century?”

The capability of organizations to respond to unexpected events has been investigated from different theoretical angles: organizational learning, improvisation, ambidexterity, resilience, to name but a few. These concepts, however, hardly ever refer to structural characteristics. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, based on systems and organizational learning theory, it will theoretically link the characteristics of organizational structure with organizational responses to unexpected external jolts, thus contributing to better understand the reactions of organizations to the unexpected. Second, it will empirically illustrate the relation of organizational structure with organizational responses by investigating how Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Austria reacted to the unexpected inflow of refugees from Central Europe. In 2015, CSOs accepted a wide range of responsibilities and worked together with government entities to provide shelter, catering, and transport for almost one million refugees. Based on participant observations during operation, in-depth interviews (2015 and 2016) and focus groups with decision-makers (2017), we will sketch three longitudinal case studies of organizations with very different structures, concentrating on the processes and operations they developed during the crisis. Our findings show that their responses are closely related to their structure, specifically to the flexibility and the stability of structural elements. Remarkable changes took place in all organizations investigated. Initial responses and first structural changes occurred mainly where the structure already allowed for flexibility. Yet in the long run, the adaptations also impacted the stable structural elements.

This article explores the growing forms of collaboration between volunteers and professionals within the Italian refugee reception system through the lens of boundary work—an ongoing process of reciprocal demarcation and self-reflexivity that positions them in synergy, tension, or mutual opposition. Drawing on 33 qualitative interviews conducted at Italian reception facilities employing both volunteer and paid staff, this study explains why volunteers are welcomed in these settings. Volunteers are expected and willing to build authentic and unique relationships with migrants, expanding opportunities for housing, employment, and training, while extending care beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of institutional reception, softening the disciplinary logic characterizing these contexts. However, we show that the boundaries between professional and volunteer care logics and practices are also carefully monitored and managed in the pursuit of a mutually beneficial diversity. These efforts are aimed at preventing care from becoming an overly individualized endeavour that could undermine bureaucratic, rights-based standards of equity and foster dependency rather than autonomy among refugees. This analysis highlights the perceived opportunities and risks of collaboration between volunteers and professionals in these contexts, contributing to a deeper understanding of the functioning and outcomes of refugee reception systems.