Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Initial Comparisons

Anheier and Salamon shed some light on volunteering in different parts of the world by exploring the conceptions and patterns of voluntary action cross-nationally. As a cultural and economic phenomenon, volunteering is part of the way societies are organized, how they allocate social responsibilities, and how much engagement and participation they expect from citizens

Remodelling the third sector: advancing collaboration or competition in community-based initiatives?

In the last decade, UK public agencies have increasingly been required to collaborate with non-state providers to deliver welfare services. Third sector organisations are now providers of services from early years to old age, taking a growing role in children and young people's services in socially deprived neighbourhoods. National policy has recognised third sector expertise in working with marginal groups of people. However, changing relationships with the state have drawn community organisations into new, often uncomfortable, organisational arrangements, affecting their work and their roles in relation to service users and community stakeholders. This article examines recent changes from a third sector perspective, drawing on data from a study of community-based organisations providing children and young people's services in deprived localities. It considers the changing environment of ‘new localism’ affecting these organisations, focusing on recent plans for local area commissioning of services. The article identifies some progress in supporting community services in deprived areas but illustrates how the continuing emphasis on competitive contracts and centrally driven frameworks undermines collaborative work and community trust. It argues that such mechanisms may serve short-term state interests but devalue the very community-level work, which is increasingly being promoted to address challenging social problems

The Third sector in France and the Labour Market Policy

In France, like in other Western European countries, the third sector has been on a steady increase during the last decade as the results of the Johns Hopkins comparative project shows it. Today nonprofit organisations play also an increasing role in labour market policies. In a country with a corporatist welfare state, the access to the labour-market represents the key for social rights

NGO Legitimacy: Four Models

The aim of this paper is to examine NGOs’ legitimacy in the context of global politics. In order to yield a better understanding of NGOs’ legitimacy at the international level it is important to examine how their legitimacy claims are evaluated. This paper proposes dividing the literature into four models based on the theoretical and analytical approaches to their legitimacy claims: the market model, social change model, new institutionalism model and the critical model. The legitimacy criteria generated by the models are significantly different in their analytical scope of how one is to assess the role of NGOs operating as political actors contributing to democracy. The paper argues that the models present incomplete, and sometimes conflicting, views of NGOs’ legitimacy and that this poses a legitimacy dilemma for those assessing the political agency of NGOs in world politics. The paper concludes that only by approaching their legitimacy holistically can the democratic role of NGOs be explored and analysed in the context of world politics

Making embedded knowledge transparent: How the V-Dem dataset opens new vistas in civil society research

We show how the V-Dem data opens new possibilities for studying civil society in comparative politics. We explain how V-Dem was able to extract embedded expert knowledge to create a novel set of civil society indicators for 173 countries from 1900 to the present. This data overcomes shortcomings in the basis on which inference has been made about civil society in the past by avoiding problems of sample bias that make generalization difficult or tentative. We begin with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics. We then turn to the shortcomings of the existing data and discusses how the V-Dem data can overcome them. We introduce the new data, highlighting two new indices—the core civil society index (CCSI) and the civil society participation index (CSPI)—and explain how the individual indicators and the indices were created. We then demonstrate how the CCSI uses embedded expert knowledge to capture the development of civil society on the national level in Venezuela, Ghana, and Russia. We close by using the new indices to examine the dispute over whether post-communist civil society is “weak.” Time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2,999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012 fails to find that post-communist civil society is substantially different from other regions, but that there are major differences between the post-Soviet subsample and other post-communist countries both in relation to other regions and each other

Dominant stakeholders, activity and accountability discharge in the CSO Sector

Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) comprise a diverse range of associations, including NGOs, community groups, political parties and social networks. Nevertheless, despite heterogeneity, regulators, funders and donors often treat CSOs as homogeneous when demanding accountability. This paper highlights differences in to whom CSOs across different categories (or types) perceive themselves to be accountable, what for, and the different practices they undertake to discharge accountability. It calls for stakeholders to acknowledge diversity in accountability across different CSO types. This survey-based research finds CSOs weight upwards and downwards stakeholders equally, and undertake voluminous reporting. They would benefit from negotiating multiple-use mechanisms, especially with dominant stakeholders. In combining stakeholder and accountability theory, the research highlights specific CSO types needing further study

Paid and unpaid labor in nonprofit organizations: Does the substitution effect exist?

In nonprofit organizations (NPOs) volunteers often work alongside paid workers. Such a coproduction setting can lead to tension between the two worker groups. This paper examines for the first time if and how volunteers in uence the separation of paid employees, and thus it contributes to the debate over whether volunteers can substitute paid workers. Using Austrian data on an organizational level we find a significant impact of volunteers on the separations of paid workers in NPOs facing increased competition. These findings support the assumption that a partial substitution effect exists between paid workers and volunteers