Recent surveys have suggested that over half of UK households own a pet. One important aspect to this ownership is ensuring that access to appropriate veterinary care is available for their pets. To measure the ease of accessibility to such care, three aspects are important, the local demand for veterinary care, the supply of care, and the ease of travel to obtain the care. For the first element, in this study estimates were made of the household pet population for all neighbourhoods in England and Wales (36,672 neighbourhoods each containing approximately 700 households). Information regarding the location and number of veterinarians working in local practices was then used, with vehicle journey times, to provide a measure of accessibility to veterinary care. It was found that the more affluent and rural locations have better accessibility to veterinary care than deprived and urban locations. The detailed geography of the estimates provided by this study enabled the location of potential ‘veterinary deserts’ to be identified. With this knowledge additional provision can be prioritised to such locations with a view to improving the welfare of companion animals. Not only will this improve the accessibility of veterinary care but, through competition, this also has the potential to reduce care costs. Thus, the likelihood of pets receiving the care they need will improve. Whilst this study focuses upon England and Wales, the methodology presented would be equally valid in other settings where appropriate data exist.

Despite a growing literature on niche parties, little is known about whether and how these parties are responsive to policy competition. Drawing upon data on regionalist parties’ programmatic strategies across Western Europe from 1971 to 2009, I find that these niche parties are more ideologically flexible than previously posited when facing governmental policy appeasement. While they do not shift to a more extreme issue position following increases in a region's decentralization level, regionalist parties do broaden their issue agenda. Issue diversification, however, is limited to those parties whose goals are being met; dissatisfied secessionist parties do not expand their issue emphases after decentralization reforms short of independence. Supported by emerging evidence of similar agenda diversification among appeased green and radical right parties, these analyses further our understanding of niche parties as strategic actors and offer new explanations for variation in the effectiveness of mainstream party tactics towards them.

Nonprofit organizations increasingly rely on earned revenue to sustain their mission-driven activities. Previous research examining the effects of earned revenue on other income streams tends to study earned revenue in the aggregate. Using panel data from 12,372 organizations from 2010 to 2015, this analysis applies a framework of revenue embeddedness to link earned revenue activities to mission and analyze the effects of earned revenue activities on donations. Earned revenue activities offering new products or services to existing donors appear to complement individual donations. These findings have theoretical and practical applications related to how nonprofits pursue earned revenue.

Key functions of civil society organizations (CSOs) are to criticize governments and to hold them to account. Recent trends of privatization and contracting out challenge CSOs’ opportunities to voice such criticism. The purpose of this article is to analyse whether and why CSOs ‘hold back their criticism’ of public authorities, and how a compromised advocacy can be linked to financial, organizational and institutional factors. The article draws on an original survey of 2678 Swedish CSOs. The analyses show that certain levels of funding make CSOs more likely to hold back in their criticism, but also organizational and institutional factors play a role. The results identify the importance of distinguishing between objective and subjective factors related to how dependency is framed. It is the felt needs, experiences and perceptions of CSOs themselves that make hem prone to the strategic choice to hold back criticism of public authorities.

This article focuses on the nexus between the governance of U.S. nonprofit organizations and their ability to secure the resources necessary to effectively execute their missions. Different sources of nonprofit income are associated with alternative stakeholders. Viewing these constituencies as beneficiary groups, we consider how the particular mix of income sources influences the capacity of nonprofits to generate resources, especially if there is competition among stakeholder groups for control of the organization’s policies and practices. We then ask how nonprofit governance might be modified to improve the ability of the organization to generate resources through a regime of economic stakeholder governance.

This article introduces a discussion on defining, measuring, and assessing the quality of democracy. Providing a short overview of the papers of the Symposium, it places them within a broader context of current academic debate on various methodological, theoretical, and policy outreach dimensions of the topic.

This article examines an experiential student workshop focused on state–voluntary sector relationships in the UK, which formed part of a postgraduate voluntary sector studies programme. The different group behaviours observed were instructive in illustrating how students, all working in third sector or related public agencies, perceive and have assimilated demands and practices of the external environment. These insights also highlight the value of experiential learning in higher education both for student reflection and research. The article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine some consequences of ideologies and behaviours associated with managerial culture permeating actions in this interactive setting. It combines critical discussion of non-profit organizations with group relations and learning theories, offering a different perspective through which to explore patterns embedded in inter-agency relationships. Consideration of ways that these patterns might be changed to improve the service environment in the voluntary sector has wider implications for research in this field.

Capitalism is in trouble, or so we have been told. I argue that Adam Smith has a lot to teach us about the future of capitalism. I first examine recent discussions about the current challenges and criticisms against capitalism such as the productivity slowdown, waning competition, the role of globalization, rising inequality, and climate change. I emphasize that there are some global trends, but there are also important national and regional differences reflecting differences in institutions and policy. Not only natural-scientific technology, but also social-scientific technology—that is, governance, policy, and institutions—matter. Then, I explain what Smith can teach us. First, Adam Smith conceives a truly inclusive capitalism: he takes income distribution into account when he argues for the desirability of economic development. Second, inclusive capitalism requires broad formation and sharing of knowledge among people. Third, the expansion of exchange and trade has beneficial effects, but we should be aware of its distributional consequences. Fourth, institutions matter. Fifth, proper law and institutions—the “system of natural liberty”—are essential to a well-functioning market economy. However, the “system of natural liberty” is not automatically achieved. Policy and institutions are history-dependent; therefore, history matters.

This paper analyzes the relationship between microfinance, competition, and growth in a sample of 119 countries over the period 1999–2018. Our results are fourfold. First, we show that microfinance increases economic growth. Second, we identify investment and consumption as the main channels explaining the positive effect of microfinance on growth. Third, our study highlights that the conventional financial sector and microfinance are substitutes and not complements in emerging and developing countries. Finally, we show that competitive microfinance markets allow increasing the positive effect of microfinance on growth.

This study examined the interaction of different types of crosslinguistic cues in second language (L2) morphosyntactic processing. Our target constructions, Korean morphological causatives, contain morphosyntactic constraints that present interlingual overlap for Japanese speakers when the construction is derived from an intransitive verb, while constituting interlingual contrast when derived from a transitive verb. For Chinese speakers, these constraints only exist in the L2 and thus constitute L2-unique information. In two self-paced reading experiments involving proficiency-matched Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean, we found that Japanese speakers successfully detected morphosyntactic errors only in the intransitive-based construction, which shares overlapping constraints with Japanese, but not in the transitive-based construction whose morphosyntactic constraints contrast with the Japanese counterparts. In contrast, Chinese speakers exhibited sensitivity to the violations in both intransitive- and transitive-based constructions. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic competition causes a major problem in L2 sentence processing.

Drought-tolerant (DT) corn (Zea mays L.) hybrids are developed to provide crop protection from plant water stress in areas prone to drought like the Intermountain West. These regions also face challenges from weeds because of the wide range of developmental and physiological mechanisms possessed by weeds that give an ecological advantage under increased temperature and water stress. Many weeds have developed resistance to some herbicides; therefore, understanding weed interactions with DT corn is important in developing sustainable strategies for management in water-stressed environments. A two-season field experiment was conducted to evaluate the critical period of weed control (CPWC) in DT versus drought-susceptible (DS) corn hybrids exposed to optimal and reduced irrigation in Utah. Treatment combinations of the two corn hybrids, two irrigation levels, and time of weed removal were arranged in a split-split plot design with each treatment replicated four times. Exponential decay and asymptotic regression models were used to determine the CPWC based on an estimated 5% relative yield loss in corn. Up to 5% and 42% yield differences were observed between weed-free and weedy plots throughout the 2021 and 2022 field seasons, respectively. The beginning and end of CPWC differed between the two corn hybrids as well as between the two irrigation levels in both seasons. CPWC was 19.5 and 28 d for DT corn under optimal irrigation in 2021 and 2022, respectively. CPWC was increased for DS corn with optimal irrigation to 52 and 35 d in 2021 and 2022, respectively. A similar result was observed with reduced irrigation for each hybrid (5 and 48.5 d for DT corn and 35 and 50 d for DS corn in 2021 and 2022, respectively). The results suggest that use of DT corn may help reduce the need for more intensive weed management because it reduces the CPWC.

The article looks at instances of specialisation for specific linguistic contexts in ‘command’ and ‘inference’ uses of will and must. It tests the feasibility of different motivations for this specialisation, such as statistical and construal pre-emption. It also proposes a new motivation for specialisation, polysemous pre-emption, i.e. whether a strongly entrenched polyseme of a given expression might pre-empt the use of an expression with a less strongly entrenched polyseme. The investigation uses corpus analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis to test the three motivations (statistical, construal, and polysemous pre-emption). The results show that all instances of specialisation with will and must could be explained through construal pre-emption and/or polysemous pre-emption, thus making recourse to statistical pre-emption unnecessary.