News Media Regulation: A Mixed Membership Model Approach

<p>The traditional platform-centric approach to media regulation is no longer tenable with the distinct line between broadcast and print media being blurred by mainstream media combining text and video via the internet. To address platform convergence, the Law Commission recommends a universal news media regulator, the News Media Standards Authority, which encompasses broadcasters, the press and onlineonly providers. The Commission endorses a voluntary membership model with a range of incentives to entice entities to join. This paper will critique the efficacy of the Commission’s incentives before undertaking a first principles analysis of news media regulation to illustrate the need for an element of compulsion in the membership model of the News Media Standards Authority. This paper argues that a mixed membership model, whereby a matrix of factors is used to determine the entities that will be required to join, is more appropriate for the News Media Standards Authority.</p>

News Media Regulation: A Mixed Membership Model Approach

<p>The traditional platform-centric approach to media regulation is no longer tenable with the distinct line between broadcast and print media being blurred by mainstream media combining text and video via the internet. To address platform convergence, the Law Commission recommends a universal news media regulator, the News Media Standards Authority, which encompasses broadcasters, the press and onlineonly providers. The Commission endorses a voluntary membership model with a range of incentives to entice entities to join. This paper will critique the efficacy of the Commission’s incentives before undertaking a first principles analysis of news media regulation to illustrate the need for an element of compulsion in the membership model of the News Media Standards Authority. This paper argues that a mixed membership model, whereby a matrix of factors is used to determine the entities that will be required to join, is more appropriate for the News Media Standards Authority.</p>

Self-maintenance vs. goal attainment: drivers of mortality anxiety in organized civil society

When do membership-based civil society organizations such as interest groups, political parties or service-oriented organizations consider their existence under threat? Distinguishing pressures of organizational self-maintenance from functional pressures of goal attainment, which all voluntary membership organizations – irrespective of their political or societal functions - need to reconcile, we propose a framework theorizing distinct categories of drivers of mortality anxiety in organized civil society. To test our hypotheses, we apply ordered logistic regression analysis to new data covering regionally and nationally active interest groups, service-oriented organizations and parties in Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. We find that factors enhancing intraorganizational resilience thereby facilitating self-maintenance as well as exposure to different representation challenges complicating goal attainment have significant effects on mortality anxiety experienced by interest groups, political parties and service-oriented organizations alike – the former reducing, the latter enhancing it. Stressing the importance of a stable, durable organizational infrastructure with loyal and involved members to operate in increasingly volatile and diverse environments, our findings highlight the on-going importance of ‘traditional’ (sometimes considered ‘outdated’) organization-building.

Empirical Research on the Latent Factors that Facilitate the Individuals’ Interaction with the Community

The communion of interests and the open, voluntary membership which characterise social economy enterprises are a challenge we will be trying to deal with in this paper. Our dilemma regarding the existence of some conditionality between the individuals’ expectations from their community and their availability to get involved in solving community problems has become the main objective of the study. Solving this dilemma came as a natural consequence of the initiation of a questionnaire-based study, including separate sets of questions concerning the perception of the participants about how the community meets their expectations, combined with questions about their availability to act to the benefit of the community. The work hypotheses were tested with the IBM Statistics and Microsoft Excel applications. The results obtained after testing the hypotheses signal two important aspects: on the one hand, the availability of the participants in the study to act for the benefit of their communities is not conditional on the expectations they have from the community and, on the other hand, at the time of the survey, the preference of the study participants to act for the benefit of the community is not sufficiently well defined.Keywords: communities, social economic enterprise, solidarity, social implication

The State and Civil Society

State regulation of civil society organizations such as interest groups, parties, and public benefit organizations is expanding yet widely contested, often portrayed as illegitimate intrusion. Despite ongoing debates about the nature of state–voluntary relations in various social science disciplines, we know surprisingly little about why long-lived democracies adopt more or less constraining legal approaches in this sphere. Drawing on insights from political science, sociology, and comparative law as well as public administration research, this book addresses this important question, conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. It addresses the conceptual and methodological challenges related to developing systematic, comparative insights into the nature of complex legal environments affecting voluntary membership organizations, by simultaneously covering a wide range of democracies and the regulation applicable to different types of voluntary organizations. Proposing the analytical tools to tackle those challenges, it studies in depth the intertwined and overlapping legal environments of political parties, interest groups, and public benefit organizations across nineteen long-lived democracies. After presenting an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical framework theorizing democratic states’ legal disposition or disinclination to regulate voluntary membership organizations in a constraining or permissive fashion, this framework is empirically tested. Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the comparative analysis identifies three main ‘paths’ accounting for the relative constraints in the legal environments democracies have created for organized civil society, defined by different configurations of political systems’ democratic history, their legal family, and voluntary sector traditions. Providing the foundation for a mixed-methods design, three ideal-typical representatives of each path—Sweden, the UK, and France—are selected for the in-depth study of these legal environments’ long-term evolution, to capture reform dynamics and their drivers that have shaped group and party regulation over many decades.

The Global Historical and Contemporary Impacts of Voluntary Membership Associations on Human Societies

Reviewed here is global research on how 13 types of Voluntary Membership Associations (MAs) have significantly or substantially had global impacts on human history, societies, and life. Such outcomes have occurred especially in the past 200+ years since the Industrial Revolution circa 1800 CE, and its accompanying Organizational Revolution. Emphasized are longer-term, historical, and societal or multinational impacts of MAs, rather than more micro-level (individual) or meso-level (organizational) outcomes. MAs are distinctively structured, with power coming from the membership, not top-down. The author has characterized MAs as the dark matter of the nonprofit/third sector, using an astrophysical metaphor. Astrophysicists have shown that most physical matter in the universe is dark in the sense of being unseen, not stars or planets.