Why do political organizations split? Drawing insight from organizational theory and social movement literature, this article explores the effect of organizational factors on group schism. Using a new data set of 112 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East, the article examines to what extent organizational factors such as leadership structure, organizational legality, and tactical intensity, as well as contextual variables such as state violence and external support for the organization, influence group schism. Findings show that organizations with a factional or competing leadership structure and those that use violence as a tactic are at a greater risk to split. Contrary to research on political parties, which highlight the importance of factional leadership structure in relation to the maintenance and growth of the party organization, findings suggest that competing leadership structure, along with the employment of tactical violence, precipitates ethnopolitical organizational fission and eventual splintering.

Economic, cultural, and political opportunity structures have been separately shown to facilitate and constrain abortion rights. We examine two central and related questions: First, which factors explain liberalization of different types of abortion laws? Second, which factor or set of factors is the most important in explaining abortion laws? The cross-national literature suggests a three-pronged explanation for the existence of abortion rights, including politics, economics, and culture. We parse these out into the structural and empowerment components of each, and posit a theory of rights in which empowerment factors are at least as important, if not more important, for explaining change than structural factors. To test this, we examine the impact of these components on the liberalization of abortion rights globally utilizing a distributed lag model. We find that an empowerment approach explains the liberalization of abortion laws better than a structural approach in terms of politics, but that a structural approach is a better predictor in terms of culture, and that both empowerment and structural factors are important predictors when economic factors are taken into account. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for understanding policy change and human rights on a global scale.

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A significant goal of public administrators in this era of shrinking public funds has been to find ways to enhance and measure organizational capacity and sustainability with minimal outlays of resources. One attempt to address this goal was the Rural Pilot Program, funded by the Office of Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice. Based on the evaluation of the program, this article (1) describes how capacity was measured, (2) discusses the validation and utility of a self‐administered instrument, and (3) examines whether and to what extent organizational capacity is enhanced by an intermediary funding model. Modest positive changes were found in two areas—organizational staffing and information technology—but no changes were found in other areas. The article concludes with recommendations for designing future programs to enhance capacity and sustainability and for public administrators and grant makers in utilizing self‐administered capacity instruments.

W hat factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a differential impact on the likelihood that an organization will target civilians for violence. This article uses data from the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior database to examine these issues with respect to ethno-political organizations. It argues that the typical analytic focus on general violence obscures understanding of the factors that lead to targeting civilians. It finds that targeting civilians-while similar in some respects to the use of general violence-is different, particularly with respect to organizational ideology.