(Non)Environmental Alternative Action Organizations under the Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis: A Comparative European Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

(Non)Environmental Alternative Action Organizations under the impacts of the global financial crisis: a comparative European perspective

This paper is extensively cited, which I appreciate because the concept of EAAOs is novel to me and I wanted to look deeper into it as I read.

I find the argument that economic crisis leads to more participatory solidarity among EAAOs to be a weak one (e.g. lines 12-15, 77-79, 371-373). The data in this set are used in a cross-sectional approach for one time period (2007-2016) rather than a longitudinal one, and given the novelty of the methods it’s hard to make a claim about the accuracy of any comparisons to other periods. The paper would make a lot more sense under a framework of cross-country comparison because that’s actually in the results already, and the authors should work to expand that focus to be the center of the analysis.

Methods

The use of AOA is compelling, and I had to go look up the first author’s previous work on it since I don’t know much about it. It seems like a lot of person-hours went into this project based on reading the author’s 2018 article in American Behavioral Scientist using the same data set. That this study achieves what is essentially a census of relevant organizations in the database lends confidence to both reliability and validity of the measures.

The selection criteria make sense for what constitutes an EAAO out of all the AAOs. However, the criteria does not account for – or at least list as a shortcoming – the degree to which an AAO is focused on environmental action. For example, if an AAO is mainly focused on housing affordability and peripherally includes renewable energy under its umbrella of making housing more affordable, is this coded the same as an EAAO whose sole focus is renewable energy? I would like to see the authors comment on how EAAOs may or may not also be non-environmental AAOs, and why their participation in any environmentally-focused action should be considered a better-than-arbitrary dividing line against EAAOs whose primary focus is the environment.

Ideally, the authors could present a revision with a normed category for EAAO selection – how many of the selection criteria on lines 233-244 were met on average for an EAAO compared to the overall number of issues the average AAO focused on. I understand this might not be possible if the data set is not structured to answer such a question. If not, this should at least be noted as an avenue for future research or a shortcoming of the present study.

Results

Figures 1 and 2 are really interesting. I like how they support notions that there are tiers among European countries’ environmentalist movements.

Other comments

The author contributions, IRB statement, and informed consent statement are all stock language and should be either edited to reflect the paper submitted or eliminated.

Lines 38-40: Tense disagreement in this sentence. Should probably “have shown.”

Lines 40-41: Subject-verb disagreement, should probably be “suggest.”

Line 64: Comma before “important” rather than after

Line 150: “This analysis” is an unclear subject. Noting a clearer subject in the previous sentence – details about the study and who performed it - would clarify this.

Line 193: “was” not “has been”

Line 218: There’s an end parenthesis missing in this sentence.

Author Response

We are grateful for the excellent review and have tried to follow all the constructive comments and suggestions. The revisions are shown in the manuscript with track changes on and are treated one-by-one below.

The first comment states that our argument that “economic crisis leads to more participatory solidarity among EAAOs” is weak because our data is cross-sectional rather than a panel or time series.

We understand and appreciate the note regarding the cross-sectional rather than time-series character of our data. On p. 5, we note that “Even though our limited time and resources had not allowed coding EAAOs for a longer period (e.g. 2000-2016), unlike a survey, the AOA approach, that codes information from the EAAO’s organizational website, allows us to analyze EAAOs based on their year of establishment and the year of creation of their organizational website. We can therefore trace and illustrate which EAAOs were established each year, from 2007 to 2016. We expected fewer organizations in the first years of the crisis and an increasing number from 2009 onwards.”

Given this, we added two related figures on pp 7-9.

We have clarified this in the text - see page 6.

Secondly, regarding the data.  We appreciate the comment regarding the limitation of defining EAAOs very much. Luckily, our data allows us to answer the query relatively well – this is done on p. 5.

Finally, we have addressed all the “Other comments”.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors use of online directories (hub we-websites) was a very good method.  It can be complicated when you are trying to locate some environmental groups or small environmental groups due to their limited economic funds, small staff and location. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for this comment and revised it accordingly – see p. 5.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revision offered by the authors has substantially addressed the major critiques I put forth. The weakness of the longitudinal argument has been rectified with the addition of new figures 1 and 2, which go a long way to showing the differences in the formation of EAAOs pre- and post-financial crisis. Also, the addition of a clarifying expectation on lines 240-246 help.

Finally, the authors add good clarifying language for the selection criteria of EAAOs against AAOs in a general sense on lines 266-281, 343-352, 400-404.