Research on differences between public, for-profit, and nonprofit providers of welfare services has provided mixed findings, depending on welfare state arrangement, regulation, and service area. This paper’s objective is to study the differences between public, nonprofit (cooperatives and other nonprofits), and for-profit welfare providers from the perspective of the users in the tightly regulated Scandinavian context. We ask how the users perceive the providers from different sectors differently and how this variation can be explained. The study relies on a large-scale survey carried out in 2015 in the city of Oslo, Norway. From the survey, we identify the two main results. First, despite limited differences, users of nonprofit kindergartens are generally more satisfied than users of for-profit and public kindergartens. Second, an important explanation for variations in user satisfaction among kindergartens is identified in a pocket of regulatory leniency: the quality of food service. This is the only expense that varies among kindergartens in Norway. These results indicate that more lenient regulations could potentially increase provider distinctiveness. Based on the existing literature, we discuss why nonprofit providers seem to fare better in the minds of users than public and for-profit providers.

Government formation in multi‐party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade‐off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters’ willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters’ acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.

Cataract is the primary cause of treatable blindness in low- and middle-income countries. Due to limited resources, the public sector often fails to provide adequate services, resulting in long waiting times, low quality or significant quantity gaps. Nonprofits are crucial in providing supplementary or complementary funding and resources for affordable eye care and other public goods and services. This study evaluates costs and benefits of cataract surgery at the nonprofit Mexican Institute of Ophthalmology (IMO) using data from interviews conducted in 2022 to estimate its social return. For every peso invested, the average stakeholder receives a 12:1 return in improved autonomy, self-confidence, and reduced stress levels. Sensitivity analysis suggests a SROI ratio of at least 2:1 in the most restrictive scenario, increasing to 33:1 under more lenient assumptions. Measuring and communicating the social value of nonprofit activities is critical for optimizing resource allocation, enhancing accountability, and generating valuable insights into their effectiveness.

Hélène Landemore's Open Democracy (2020) offers both a normative conception of popular rule and an institutional schema intended to advance it. This schema is grounded in a normative conception of popular rule that associates democracy with the values of inclusion and equality. But this association misses a historically important dimension of popular rule—popular sovereignty—which requires the people as a whole to play a critical part in decision making. Landemore's dismissal of popular sovereignty informs her institutional schema, which relies upon both sortition and self-selection. It leaves no significant room for the people as a whole to act, either directly (via referenda) or indirectly (via election). Landemore never explicitly defends this dismissal of popular sovereignty from her conception of popular rule. Given the historical importance of this dimension of popular rule, and its continuing intuitive appeal, any such dismissal requires careful justification.

Approximately 96 per cent of older adults in Australia live at home and one-third of older people aged 65+ are of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Despite recognising that aged care experiences are shaped by sociocultural and institutional systems, there are no scoping reviews of Australia-based research to advance understanding of how family care is provided and received in CALD families. This scoping review fills the research gap by systematically synthesising research on the experiences of family carers of older migrants in Australia to broaden the literature on how sociocultural context shapes care experiences. Using Arksey and O’Malley’s five-stage framework, we searched data on seven electronic databases to solicit journal articles published from 2014 to 2024. After assessing 5,004 studies meeting the eligibility criteria, 15 articles were included and analysed. Thematic analysis identified four themes: (1) cultural expectations of family care; (2) emotional and instrumental burdens of family care; (3) generational gaps in understanding family care; and (4) barriers to accessing services beyond family care. The findings showed strong cultural expectations of filial support among both older migrants and their family carers across cultural groups. However, balancing filial obligations with job commitments proved challenging, and language and system barriers prevented access to needed external care services. This study recommends policies and practices to integrate community and family care. This can improve carers’ experiences and facilitate the delivery of culturally appropriate care to meet care needs.

This paper investigates the effect of volunteering on quality of life (QoL) in 50+ populations across European countries and Israel. We analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Using the Kendall tau-b correlation coefficients, we show that the extent of effect volunteering has on quality of life is nonlinearly related to the prevalence of volunteering in a given country. The relationship follows an inverted-U-shaped curve. In countries where volunteering is the most popular (Denmark, Switzerland, and Belgium) and in countries with the lowest rates (Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Spain), the correlation between volunteering and one’s quality of life is low. The correlation is high in countries with medium levels of volunteering (Austria, Italy, and Israel). Moreover, volunteering affects more internal than external domains of QoL. These new insights extend the discussion started by Haski-Leventhal (Voluntas Int J Volunt Nonprofit Organ 20:388–404, 2009). Our study is correlational, and we do not claim causality.

This contribution about the Netherlands to the special issue [or: section] on volunteering and civic action focuses on changes in public understanding and policy perspectives. Developments since the second half of the nineteenth century show shifting emphases on active membership (based on associational life and typical of the phenomenon of ‘pillarization’), active citizenship (based more on an individual sense of responsibility and more or less political in nature) and unpaid work (volunteering as a gift to society and other people). Government policy over the last two decades has focused heavily on ‘reponsibilization’ of citizens, both as regards providing help to others when they need it (unpaid work/informal care) and in terms of their relationship with the society in which they live (active citizenship). We expand further on the recent notion of the ‘do-democracy’ as a populist and anti-political way of doing things together on a small scale instead of engaging in democratic controversies and trying to get a grip on big issues.

This article investigates how the sex of party heads impacts party positions and uncovers that parties led by a woman modify their stances on sociocultural but not economic debates. I argue that this pattern is a consequence of dissimilar gender gaps in policy preferences across the two ideological dimensions at the elite level. The empirical evidence, based on data for 19 developed democracies around the world between 1995 and 2018, reveals that parties led by a woman tend to emphasise green, alternative and libertarian issues. In particular, anti‐growth, environmental protection and freedom and human rights become more prominent elements of party manifestos under women's leadership. Overall, these findings stress the importance of critical actors and the conditions under which the presence of women in political offices translates into responsiveness towards female citizens.

In this paper, I propose an updated analysis of the tone system of Paicî, one of the rare tonal Oceanic languages. Building on Jean-Claude Rivierre's (1974) work, I show that the tonal system of Paicî is best described with three underlying primitives: a High tone, a Low tone, and a downstep /↓/ analyzed as a register feature independent of tone. Paicî is particularly interesting for the empirical documentation as well as the typological and theoretical understanding of downstep, because it combines many rare properties: (i) only downstepped ↓L is attested; (ii) downstep is incompatible with H tones within the prosodic word (*↓H, *H…↓L); (iii) it is realized utterance-initially; (iv) it has accentual properties, and very likely derives from a former accentual system. The paper also provides an acoustic description of tone and downstep in Paicî, an important step toward filling a serious gap in the documentation of downstepped ↓L tones and their properties.

Political parties maintain connections with various sub-organisations to engage different segments of society. Common among these are party youth wings. These relationships are often described as mutual, where votes are exchanged for policies. However, little research delves into how members of these sub-organisations perceive their roles in relation to the senior party. Based on a web survey of approximately 3000 respondents, this study investigates the views of youth wing members within Swedish political parties. Specifically, it explores whether members believe their youth wing’s primary role should be to influence or support the senior party. Drawing on theories of political engagement incentives, it examines the connection between members’ political and career motivations and their perceptions of these roles. Results suggest that those with career-oriented incentives tend to view the youth wing as supportive, while politically motivated members prioritise influencing the senior party. This research contributes to our understanding of the complex dynamics within political parties and their affiliated organisations, shedding light on how individual motivations shape organisational roles.

The constituted legal status of “Union citizenship” has added another democratic static to the European Union's institutional architecture but it is not yet a status of full political empowerment. What is missing is a citizen-centered opening-up of the (technocratically disguised) European level as a political arena. This article argues that the idea of European citizenship can function as a normative reference point for struggles of political empowerment and institutional reform. Democratic innovations such as sortition-based citizens’ panels organized within the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe have a socializing function, paving the way for a European-wide public debate on issues of common concern and opening up a chance of (re)appropriating the European Union's institutional structure as a political space. But in order to support lasting democratic transformations they must be backed up by institutional reforms that make European political rights more effective.

This study aimed at developing a scale to measure Social Added Value (SAV) according to the perspective of community members, building on the relational framework and complementing the work of Mannarini et al. (Voluntas: Int J Voluntary Nonprofit Organ 29(6):1315–1329, 2018). The study was conducted on 720 Italian citizens who were not directly involved in Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations (NPVOs) as active members to examine the statistical validity and psychometric properties of the SAV scale. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that good and satisfactory fit indexes were obtained by a third-order factor model saturated by two second-order variables (contribution to community and quality of external relationships) and eight first-order variables (services and tasks, vision, social responsibility, control mutuality, communality relationship, trust, commitment, capacity to build community connections). Additional analyses revealed that both perceived NPVOs target values and sense of belonging to the community were positively associated with SAV. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

The presence of an elite group in civil society elicits a discursive friction between the long-standing normative understanding of civil society, acting as a check on government overreach and autocratic tendencies, and elite theories. Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy posits that as individuals rise in the ranks to become organizational leaders, they begin to take on elite attributes, and their priorities align with those of other elites and away from those of their constituents. Michels’s argument echoes with today’s populist anti-elitist rhetoric and the way populism rejects any intermediary bodies between the people and the political leaders, including interest organizations in civil society. As an attempt to empirically probe this theoretical tension, this paper explores satisfaction with the way democracy is working among the top-level leaders of the most well-resourced national-level civil society organizations in Sweden and in the UK, drawing on a survey study conducted in 2020–21.

A commonly explored theme in international civil society organisation (CSO) collaborations is the dominance of Northern CSOs and how this impinges on Southern CSOs’ autonomy, but there is little work on the relative importance of different collaborations for Southern CSOs. This study examined complementarity as a new approach to understanding CSO collaboration. Seeking Southern perspectives, we examined the case of CSOs working on disaster risk reduction in India and developed a typology of complementarities in this domain. The article considers the implications for understanding complementarity in broader CSO collaborations. We find that constructing collaborations through the lens of complementarity may facilitate capitalising on diversity among CSOs and help build collaborations that consider the domestic orientation of many Southern CSOs and reshape the roles of Northern CSOs as complementary rather than leading.

Existing explanations of individual preferences for decentralisation and secession focus on collective identity, economic considerations and party politics. This paper contributes to this literature by showing that preferences for fiscal and political decentralisation are also driven by concern about the quality of government in the face of corruption. It makes two claims. Firstly, information on national‐level corruption decreases satisfaction with national politicians, and subsequently increases preferences for decentralisation and secession. Secondly, information on regional‐level corruption pushes citizens of highly corrupt regions to prefer national retrenchment and unitary states. The effects of this political compensation mechanism crosscut national identities and involve regions that are not ethnically or economically different from the core. We test our argument using a survey experiment in Spain and confirm its cross‐national generalisability with data from the European Values Study.

This paper introduces Development Led Inquiry (DLI) as an approach to improve situations incorporating relationships between third sector organisations (TSOs) and agricultural scientists, universities, and the public-sector agricultural establishment. There is limited scholarly work on the role of TSOs in agricultural research. Current approaches appear premised on TSOs being researched upon, and recipients of research outcomes rather than partners in generation and application of new knowledge. DLI expands the boundaries of research systems and roles of TSOs as supporters within them. DLI builds on partnerships between NGOs, farmers’ organisations, and women’s associations; it integrates researchers and research organisations to develop, manage and report knowledge generation and application. DLI is dynamic and developmental with learning for all participants central to the process. DLI unsettles current power structures within research systems and sees research and knowledge generation as a supporter rather than leader of development. DLI is embedded in an inquiring systems approach and applies six interrelated conceptual systems thinking tools. The approach emerged from, and was applied in, a twelve-year agricultural research project in India, and was subsequently introduced to, and further developed in a research project in Pakistan.

This article addresses the limited understanding of how variegated practices of everyday automobility shape – and are shaped by – ageing processes of older adults in urban contexts, focusing on Brescia, Northern Italy. While automobility, driving and driving cessation are often studied as functional aspects of older adults’ (im)mobility, their relational dimensions – spanning multiple and diverse practices – remain largely under-explored. The research examines how older adults navigate the contradictions and challenges of urban life, health conditions and social structures through relational automobilities. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study, the article highlights how automobility serves simultaneously as a resource, a limitation and a medium for forging and sustaining social, emotional, geographical and material relationships. The findings reveal that diverse practices and experiences of automobility are deeply embedded in affective economies, interdependencies and the biopolitics of ageing, shaping – and being shaped by – the lived experiences of older adults. By conceptualizing automobility as a socio-material and relational process, the article aims at bridging critical gerontology and mobilities studies, offering new insights into how ageing and mobility practices co-produce ageing selves and conditions of being (im)mobile. This study contributes to ongoing debates in critical gerontology by problematizing dichotomic understandings of older adults’ experiences in terms such as independence versus dependence and mobility versus stasis, while also informing urban policies aimed at fostering inclusive mobility practices. This article emphasizes the need to address the socio-material and relational networks underpinning automobility, offering a nuanced perspective on the interplay between mobility, ageing and urban life.

This study examines political media consumption among non-resident citizens, and whether following politics in traditional and social media in their country of residence and origin has a mobilizing effect on voting in origin-country elections. The topic of our study is inspired by the trend towards increased enfranchisement of external citizens, improved methods for participation from abroad, and the transformation of the media landscape with enhanced possibilities for external voters to follow politics in their country of origin. Based on a survey directed towards a stratified random sample of Finnish external citizens in 15 countries, we find that politically oriented media consumption in the country of origin substantially increases the likelihood of participating in origin-country elections and that this effect holds for traditional media channels as well as for social media. A corresponding mobilizing effect is, however, not found for following politics in the country of residence. This demonstrates the value of relevant information for political participation.