Over the last three decades many Western European social democratic parties have been challenged by populist radical right parties. The growth and success of parties on the right flank of the party system represents a triple challenge to the social democrats: they increase the salience of issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the right; they appeal to working‐class voters who traditionally support the centre left; and they may facilitate the formation of centre‐right governments. This article explores social democratic parties' strategic options in the face of this challenge, and tests the widespread assumption that the centre‐left parties respond by taking a tougher stance on issues related to immigration and integration. Comparative analysis of developments in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway reveals significant variation in the substance, scope and pace of the strategic responses of their social democratic parties. And it suggests that those responses are influenced not only by the far right but also by the reactions of mainstream centre‐right parties and by parties on their left (and liberal) flank. Internal disunity, potential or actual, is also an important factor.

Feedback is an important component of the design process, but gaining access to high-quality critique outside a classroom or firm is challenging. We present CrowdCrit, a webbased system that allows designers to receive design critiques from non-expert crowd workers. We evaluated CrowdCrit in three studies focusing on the designer's experience and benefits of the critiques. In the first study, we compared crowd and expert critiques and found evidence that aggregated crowd critique approaches expert critique. In a second study, we found that designers who got crowd feedback perceived that it improved their design process. The third study showed that designers were enthusiastic about crowd critiques and used them to change their designs. We conclude with implications for the design of crowd feedback services.

Leadership plays a central role in the success of many forms of online creative collaboration, yet little is known about the challenges leaders must manage. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of leadership in three online communities whose members collaborate over the Internet to create computer-animated movies called "collabs." Our results indicate that most collabs fail. Collab leaders face two major challenges. First, leaders must design collaborative projects. Second, leaders must manage artists during the collab production process. We contrast these challenges with the available empirical research on leadership in opensource software and Wikipedia, identifying four themes: originality, completion, subjectivity, and ownership. We conclude with broader implications for online creative collaboration in its many forms.

This paper presents preliminary findings from our empirical study of the cognition employed by performers in improvisational theatre. Our study has been conducted in a laboratory setting with local improvisers. Participants performed predesigned improv "games", which were videotaped and shown to each individual participant for a retrospective protocol collection. The participants were then shown the video again as a group to elicit data on group dynamics, misunderstandings, etc. This paper presents our initial findings that we have built based on our initial analysis of the data and highlights details of interest.

Expert feedback is valuable but hard to obtain for many designers. Online crowds can provide fast and affordable feedback, but workers may lack relevant domain knowledge and experience. Can expert rubrics address this issue and help novices provide expert-level feedback? To evaluate this, we conducted an experiment with a 2×2 factorial design. Student designers received feedback on a visual design from both experts and novices, who produced feedback using either an expert rubric or no rubric. We found that rubrics helped novice workers provide feedback that was rated nearly as valuable as expert feedback. A follow-up analysis on writing style showed that student designers found feedback most helpful when it was emotionally positive and specific, and that a rubric increased the occurrence of these characteristics in feedback. The analysis also found that expertise correlated with longer critiques, but not the other favorable characteristics. An informal evaluation indicates that experts may instead have produced value by providing clearer justifications.