The turks of Bulgaria (1878–1985)

Recent events in Bulgaria have suddenly provoked a flood of reporting concerning the Turks of Bulgaria in Western media. It goes without saying that most of the reports, as is often the case, misunderstood the real situation in the country, misunderstandings due to the usual amalgam of the two principal phenomena: failure to recognise the facts and the mythological vision of the country's politico‐religious situation. It is therefore not without interest, perhaps, to recall the history and background of this complex situation for the readers of Central Asian Survey.     

Putting the Special Case in Its Place: Switzerland and Small‐N Comparison in Policy Research

This research note presents a set of strategies to conduct small‐N comparisons in policy research including the Swiss case. Even though every country can be considered “special” to some extent, the Swiss political system is often viewed as a particularly difficult case for comparison because of the impact of its idiosyncratic institutional features (most notably direct democracy). In order to deal with this problem, our note sets out two possible strategies ‐ the use of functional equivalents and of counterfactual reasoning ‐ and explains how to implement them empirically through process tracing and the establishment of causal chains. As an illustration, these strategies are used for a comparison of the process of electricity market liberalisation in Switzerland and Belgium.     

Iran's Tortuous Path Toward “Islamic Liberalism”

This article provides an overview of the intellectual and sociopolitical roots of Iran's tortuous path toward Islamic liberalism and reform. It analyzes the shift in the ideological orientation of a major faction within the political elite from a radical to a relatively moderate and liberal interpretation of Islam. The authors trace the roots of this ideological shift to a series of political developments since the triumph of the Islamic revolution in 1979, including various failures of the revolutionary regime to fulfill its populist and egalitarian promises; a considerable erosion in the legitimacy of the ruling clerics; the successful (though largely silent) resistance of the youth and women against the culturally restrictive policies of the Islamic Republic; the rise of a distinctly anti-fundamentalist, liberal-reformist interpretation of Islam by a number of Iranian theologians and religious intellectuals; and the precipitous decline in the popularity of revolutionary ideas in the 1990s. In spite of the increasing appeal of liberal-democratic ideas of individual freedom, pluralism, and political tolerance in the new reform movement and the overwhelming endorsement of these ideas in four recent national elections, including two presidential polls, the authors argue that the movement has had but a limited and, for the most part symbolic, influence on Iran's objective, and still repressive, political conditions.     

Reforming policy roles in the Jordanian policy‐making process

The aim of this diagnostic analysis is to identify the weaknesses in the process of reforming policy in Jordan. This study will first present a diagnostic analysis of the characteristics of administrative reform in Jordan. Following this, weaknesses will be identified with a focus on policy roles in the policy‐making process. Administrative reform has long been an area of interest and development in Jordan since the early 1980s. Conferences were held, political and technical committees formed, and expertise and resources invested. The outcomes of these programs have been below expectations, with inadequate impact. This investigation paid attention on how Jordan can best invest its resources to maximize efficiency in the public sector, specifically the process of reforming policy. This study concludes that the primary factor impacting efficiency, accountability, and responsiveness is the degree of authority at both national and organizational level. Recent efforts in Jordan to tackle these issues could create more conflicts that threaten the Jordanian government's stability. Other resources have been dedicated to reviewing the rules and values that govern the relationship between state and society.     

Window-conflicts in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: visual privacy,materiality and right to the city

This article focuses on the visual privacy rights as practised in the urban settings in the late Ottoman Empire (1850–70) and in contemporary Turkey (1980–2010). The analysis draws on the detailed examination of the legal conflicts on the overlooking windows between neighbouring houses in both periods. A hundred legal cases from the Ottoman context and 35 parallel cases from the last decades in Turkey were covered to understand the everyday practices of visual privacy and to compare them with the official privacy rules in the Ottoman and Republican contexts. First, the cases suggest that even today many citizens, including some lower court judges, confidently defend the urban right to be unseen from the neighbour's window despite the contrary decisions of the Supreme Court. Second, the in-depth analysis of the window-conflicts showed that the radical separation of the material world from the human world in both Islamic law and the Republican Civil Law was challenged by popular claims to visual privacy thanks to their exclusive focus on windows. It is argued that popular privacy rights were not about individual private space but about the urban built environment. Hence, windows were targets of the claims of the right to the city.     

Membership Organization’s Social Capital and the Impact on Nonprofit Sector Management

Social capital depicts the extent of mutual trust in a jurisdiction. This study examines the impact of organizational social capital (OSC) on nonprofit (NP) density. Prior studies have argued that OSC positively impacts the community and the organization itself. These studies are either theory- based or survey based. Few available empirical studies also do not examine the OSC of all the counties of the United States. This study overcomes these limitations and finds from the US county-level empirical study that social capital advanced in membership organizations is positively associated with the growth of NP density.     

A scientific approach to measure public political participation in Pakistan

Public political participation is an exhaustive subject in the democratic system that is contributing as a tilled land since the birth of democracy. It has a wide range of frequency, but voting is one of the easiest among all forms of public participation. Despite the easiness of voting, Pakistan ranks 164th in terms of voter turnout among 169 countries of the world. The voter turnout of the second largest Muslim democracy and the fifth largest among all the democratic states was recorded as 45.3% in the 2013 general election, which was less than India’s (59.4%) and even Bangladesh’s (58.2%). More than half of the population in Pakistan does not think it is its duty to cast its vote. The present study is an effort to investigate public political participation through six independent variables: democratic political party, party mobilization, security, accessibility, leadership image and moderating factor citizen distrust, and a useful sample size of 1884 was collected across the country. SPSS version 24.0 was used to measure the data. The results show significant and positive relations among the dependent and independent variables, while citizen distrust negatively moderates the dependent and independent variables of the study.     

Differential Effectiveness of a Middle School Social and Emotional Learning Program: Does Setting Matter?

There is a lack of studies in the literature addressing the differential effectiveness of Social and Emotional Learning according to their implementation setting. This study compared the effectiveness of an upper middle school Social and Emotional Learning program applied in two different settings: within school and after-school hours, while controlling for individual and class-level variables. There were 837 students (M_age?=?12.70; SD?=?0.98; 47.6% were female): 246 in the control group, 319 in the after-school intervention group and 272 in the within school schedule intervention group, assessed at pretest, post-test and follow-up seven months later. Multilevel analyses identified more positive intervention results in on self-esteem, self-control, and social awareness for students in the within school schedule groups. Girls gained more in social awareness in both program settings. This study highlights the importance of analyzing Social and Emotional Learning program´s differential effectiveness in order to optimize it.