Scholars have long emphasised the consensual nature of the intergovernmental negotiations in the Council of the European Union. Unlike other international organisations, where surface consensus has been found to be merely a cover for the dominance of powerful states, the EU literature describes a norm of generosity that works as a real constraining factor. In contrast, this article warns against descriptions of the EU as different in kind. Based on interviews with 231 EU Member State representatives involved in day‐to‐day negotiations in the Council, it finds a strong bias in generosity on behalf of the three dominant powers: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The ‘Big 3’ are strikingly unwilling to make generous concessions, compared to other states. Furthermore, from a rational perspective, there are good reasons for expecting this pattern. The study also shows that extensive pooling of power in the form of qualified majority rule and hard law commitment is associated with less generosity, while there seems to be no socialising effect towards generosity from exposure to the ‘Brussels community’. These findings cast a new light on the common narrative of the EU as a ‘soft‐bargaining’ anomaly among international organisations, where national interests are upgraded into common interests by a process of norm socialisation. Instead, it seems that the purported ‘consensus norm’ has been far from successful in transcending fundamental power asymmetries between the EU Member States.

The paper investigates processes and consequences of ‘philanthropic kinning’, that is the use of kinship and family idioms in constructing and maintaining personal relations between donors and recipients in philanthropy. Usual studies collapse the occurrence of kinship metaphors in philanthropy either as evidence of ‘prosociality’ (e.g. trust, care or love) or more frequently as evidence of ‘paternalism’ (power and domination of donors over recipients, and their objectification). This paper claims that introducing kinship and parenting studies into researching philanthropy would greatly refine our understanding of donor–recipient relations. In the framework of a qualitative case study of a philanthropic ‘godparenthood’ programme organised in Hungary supporting ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania, this paper looks at the roles, responsibilities and obligations various forms of philanthropic kinship offer for the participants; and relations of power unfolding in helping interactions. With such concerns, this paper complements earlier research on hybridisation of philanthropy, through its sectoral entanglements with kinship and family. Also, it contributes to research on inequalities in philanthropy, by showing how philanthropic kinning may recreate, modify or reshape donor–recipient power relations in diverse ways.

It has become the new truth of our age that the western world we have known is fast losing its pre-eminence to be replaced by a new international system shaped by China and increasingly determined by the economic rise of Asia. This at least is how many economists, historians and students of world politics are now viewing the future of the larger international system. This essay does not dispute some self-evident economic facts nor assume that the world will look the same in 50 years time as it does now. It does, however, question the idea that there is a power shift in the making and that the West and the United States are in steep decline. The world has a long way to go before we begin to live in a ‘post-western’ world.

The international aid system forms a powerful structural force impacting organizational landscapes and civil societies all over the world in complex ways we do not yet understand. Dominant NGO research has failed to properly address this crucial issue, because of a conceptual, theoretical, and ideological tradition that is itself embedded in this very same system’s normative, rhetorical agenda. This paper suggests some conceptual and theoretical approaches that should encourage more comparative research on the role of the development NGOs in shaping national and global civil societies.

The proliferation of volunteering for development (V4D) models, approaches and funding sources means V4D is no longer able to be neatly located within the third sector. The enormous diversity of interactions within the Youth V4D (YV4D) field provides an opportunity to examine new and different activities and trajectories to ascertain the extent to which the traditional values of V4D, reciprocity and solidarity continue to form part of YV4D. Using the classical third sector model of Evers and Laville (The third sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004), and drawing on Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001 [1944]) and Mauss (The gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Routledge, London, 1990 [1925]), in particular their concepts of redistribution and reciprocity, we present three case studies of new hybrid YV4D trajectories—university YV4D, state YV4D programmes, and volunteer tourism/voluntourism—to reveal the different logics and features of contemporary YV4D. We argue that understanding these contemporary YV4D trajectories requires a focus on organisational and stakeholder structures of diverse volunteering activities, their relational logics and the forms of reciprocity they involve. We find that in the YV4D case studies we explore the neoliberal market logic of exchange, along with political ideologies and state interests, affects the YV4D model design.

Most research on social entrepreneurship overemphasizes agency by presenting social enterprising as something that originates solely from the intrinsic motivations of individual entrepreneurs. Research that does regard the impact of state power is almost exclusively anchored in and geared toward neoliberal policy contexts. This article examines the dialectics between state power and entrepreneurial counterpower in the institutional context of the Netherlands. Moreover, since social entrepreneurs develop different tactics and strategies for responding to challenges, we use Gaventa’s power cube to distinguish forms of power and counterpower, which we then combine with the following inductively derived social entrepreneur typologies: successful hybrids, antagonistic organizers, and autonomous entrepreneurs. This offers insights into the development of theory in relation to the social entrepreneurial potential for change and civic participation.

This article uses Liberia’s national mental health program to explore how stakeholders make meaning of their work and how those meanings intertwine with various powers to shape program outcomes. We use interview data to analyze how the Carter Center (an INGO), Liberian government, and local mental health practitioners understood the program to address this stigmatized, often-ignored health issue. INGO officials emphasized personal connections, virtuous actions, and expertise in meaning-making, ideas intertwined with network, moral, and epistemic powers. Liberian government officials understood the program to be government directed but financially unaffordable, illustrating the government’s institutional authority but low economic power. Mental health clinicians perceived the program as a virtuous opportunity to gain expertise and economic advancement, although they used the power to exit when these aspirations were unrealized. This article illustrates that meaning-making cannot be divorced from actors’ various powers and that stakeholders’ failure to align meanings can undermine program outcomes.

The current crisis of democracy today is a crisis in the steering capacities of political systems as conventional representative institutions are seen as increasingly unresponsive. This has engendered a crisis of legitimacy as governing processes that affect daily life are seen as increasingly out of reach for citizens who find themselves with little or no influence over government administration, and increasingly globalized flows of markets and communication that belie the control of sovereign borders. The return to deliberative democracy as a response to the crisis has turned toward systems thinking within deliberation. Although this literature has primarily retained its normative language, approaching the crisis of democracy in terms of its empirical steering capacities is necessary to connect deliberation with its democratic aspirations. In addition to the language of steering capacities, these elements include an empirically-grounded account of the operation of power and authority as well the role of rhetoric as central rather than operating in the shadow of deliberation.

This article analyses the role of organizations’ ideological affiliation in shaping information networks within civil society and in granting access to the political sphere. It investigates whether the Catholic and Leftist affiliation of organizations impacts in the city of Turin (Italy) and Kielce (Poland). Applying different social network analysis techniques, the article finds that in both cities there is a tendency towards preferring similar partners. However, while the influence of affiliation is relevant to predict the access to policy making in Turin, in Kielce, this influence is mediated by the actor’s centrality in the social sphere. In both cities, networks are characterized by the higher centrality of Catholic organizations, which also translate in a greater involvement in the political sphere. Twenty-five years after the end of the cold war, past-affiliation is still a strong predictor of political involvement and impacts on the shape of local governance structure.

Recent years have seen accelerated processes of decentralization and devolution of social services from central government toward local authorities and from them to non-profit organizations (NPOs). This article describes a case study of the process of transition of power from a local authority to a NPO and the outcomes of this transition on public policy making. The findings presented in the article are based on a qualitative analysis of documents over a period of 7 years (1999–2006) in a large local authority in Israel and its relations with a NPO which provide services for the elderly.

Even more so than the United States, the European Union (EU) marks a classic case of an ‘anti-leadership environment’ designed to hinder rather than facilitate political leadership. While there have been, nevertheless, manifestations of leadership since the very beginning of European integration, the enigmatic features of leadership at the European level, and the specific difficulties in getting hold of the subject, have limited more systematic political research in this field. This article seeks to relate some of the perennial questions of political leadership research to the study of transnational European governance. Such an inquiry suggests that, in light of the recent changes in the conceptualization of leadership to be found in the wider literature, the empirical features of collective and dispersed leadership in the EU have gradually lost their peculiarity. This notwithstanding, the EU continues to have both a leadership and a followership problem, and the challenges ahead are unlikely to be overcome by institutional adaptation and reform alone.

South Africa's post-apartheid context and a mix of African and non-mainstream Western political theory is felicitous for a positive critique of the two now predominant Western accounts of democracy. The context highlights how deliberative and aggregative accounts of democracy fall short in their attempts to make universal claims regarding democracy; and it provides the theoretical basis for an account of political democracy that better associates democracy with freedom, power, representation, and domination. The article argues that freedom is power through political representation, and freedom obtains if and only if the existing forms of representation manage power relations in order to minimize domination and enhance political judgement amongst representatives and represented. The article submit that, unless radical institutional change is carried out, South Africa will not rid itself of the legacies of these Western models and will be unable to generate the freedom and democracy its attainment of political freedom has now long promised.

In a 2021 Special Issue in European Political Science, Anika Gauja and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen review the sub-field of party politics research. In doing so, they argue party politics scholarship reflects the broader development of the political science discipline, illustrating the evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organisations they study. In this reply, we argue that the party politics sub-field reflects the wider discipline in another crucial respect—it continues to marginalise gender politics scholarship. We demonstrate that a gendered lens fundamentally transforms key questions in the field around what party politics scholars study, and how and why they conduct their research, with relevant consequences for whose work is included. In failing to engage with this scholarship, “mainstream” party politics scholars are (re)producing unequal power relations and hierarchies within the discipline, while also depriving themselves of the capacity to address fully key questions of representation, democracy, continuity and change.

Power asymmetries within partnerships between Northern and Southern NGOs are thought to be undesirable. Based on a comparative case study of the partnerships between three Northern NGOs and their Southern partners in Ghana, India and Nicaragua, this study examines how the partnerships’ institutional design affects local partners’ room to manoeuvre. It is demonstrated that (1) the Northern agencies unilaterally set the rules that govern the partnerships, based on their own norms, values and beliefs; (2) similarities and differences between the rules of the three agencies can, above all, be attributed to the corresponding and diverging nature of their norms, values and beliefs; and (3) informal rules allow more flexibility in their use. Whether this is beneficial for the Southern partners’ room to manoeuvre depends on individual project officers, who are responsible for interpreting and applying the rules, and the partners’ ability to conduct negotiations.

European labour markets are often described as rigid with comparatively high levels of job protection that do not allow for the flexible adjustment of employment to economic fluctuations. This interpretation overlooks important sources of flexibility, however. Research has shown that recent labour market policy reforms have allowed for the creation of two‐tier labour markets consisting of insiders in standard employment relationships and outsiders in non‐standard employment. This outcome has typically been explained by pointing to the representational interests of unions or social‐democratic parties. It has been argued that rather than protecting all labour market participants, unions and social‐democratic parties focus on the interests of their members and their core constituency, respectively, most of whom are in standard employment relationships. In contrast, it is argued here that unions' institutional power resources are the crucial variable explaining this outcome. In difficult economic times, when unions are asked to make concessions, they will assent to labour market reforms, but only to those that do not fundamentally threaten to undermine their organisational interests. In the context of job security legislation, this means that unions defend the protection of permanent contracts while they compromise on the regulation of temporary employment. This ‘second best solution’ allows them to protect their organisational interests, both by retaining their institutional role in the administration of dismissals and by living up to their institutional role as one of the organisations responsible for the direction of labour market policy reform. Using fsQCA this article shows that unions' institutional power resources are more apt to explain the observed two‐tier reform pattern than the unions' or the social‐democratic parties' representational interests.

This article delves into the dynamics of power, public ethics, and injustice to explain the tolerance towards types of corruption that challenge democracy and go far beyond the most discussed illegal ‘Market’ aspects. The aim is to explore the patterns of the more ‘Parochial’ aspects of reciprocity and kinship and the ‘Institutional’ aspects of manipulating the norms and purposes of institutions that corruption has. Using the results of two original surveys conducted simultaneously (between October 2020 and April 2021), in which citizens and politicians in Portugal were asked about eleven potentially corrupt behaviours, this study concludes that it is the normalisation of parochialism in power relations that has been indirectly promoting the maintenance of institutional mechanisms that reinforce exclusion and the adoption of unethical behaviours to restore a sense of equality. It is argued that the antidote to Tolerance towards Corruption (TtC) consists of a formula that includes the constant improvement of the regulation of ethics in public life and public policies capable of mitigating the injustices associated with deprivation.