The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

2 1 The innovative transport systems and the CityMobil project 10 1.1 The research questions 10 2 The state of art in the field of automatic transport systems 12 2.1 Case studies and demand studies for innovative transport systems 12 3 The design and implementation of surveys 14 3.1 Definition of experimental design 14 3.2 Questionnaire design and delivery 16 3.3 First analyses on the collected sample 18 4 Calibration of Logit Multionomial demand models 21 4.1 Methodology 21 4.2 Calibration of the “full” model. 22 4.3 Calibration of the “final” model 24 4.4 The demand analysis through the final Multinomial Logit model 25 5 The analysis of interaction between the demand and socioeconomic attributes 31 5.1 Methodology 31 5.2 Application of Mixed Logit models to the demand 31 5.3 Analysis of the interactions between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models 32 5.4 Mixed Logit model and interaction between age and the demand for the CTS 38 5.5 Demand analysis with Mixed Logit model 39 6 Final analyses and conclusions 45 6.1 Comparison between the results of the analyses 45 6.2 Conclusions 48 6.3 Answers to the research questions and future developments 52

The European commission

Social Network Analysis

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are at the heart of a growing body of research. The nature, structure and antecedents of these attitudes, however, are in need of conceptual and empirical refinement. With growing diversification of the policies of the Union, a one-dimensional approach to attitudes towards the EU may be insufficient. This study reviews existing approaches towards theorizing EU public opinion. Based on this inventory, originally collected public opinion survey data (n = 1394) indicate the presence of five dimensions of EU attitudes: performance, identity, affection, utilitarianism and strengthening. The study furthermore shows that different predictors of EU public opinion matter to differing extents when explaining these dimensions. In light of these findings, we suggest tightening the link, conceptually and empirically, between attitudinal dimensions and their antecedents.

http://www.uva.nl/binaries/content/documents/personalpages/s/c/a.r.t.schuck/en/tab-two/tab-two/cpitem%5B10%5D/asset?1355373811781

Mapping EU attitudes: Conceptual and empirical dimensions of Euroscepticism and EU support

This article analyzes the news coverage of the 2004 European Parliamentary
(EP) elections in all 25 member states of the European Union (EU). It
provides a unique pan-European overview of the campaign coverage based
on an analysis of three national newspapers and two television newscasts in
the two weeks leading up to the elections. On average, the elections were
more visible in the new 10 member states than in the 15 old EU member
states. The political personalities and institutional actors featured in news
stories about the elections were generally national political actors and not EU
actors. When it was evaluative, the news in the old EU-15 was generally
negative towards the EU, while in the new countries a mixed pattern was
found. The findings of the study are discussed in the light of the literature on
the EU’s legitimacy and communication deficit.

The news coverage of the 2004 European Parliamentary Election Campaign in 25 countries

This cross-national study investigates the relationship between media and political knowledge and participation. Drawing on panel surveys and news media content analyses the study links exposure and attention to specific media contents to changes in political knowledge and participation. While the literature on this issue is divided, this study shows that the positive effects of news media exposure outweigh the negative effects and that the effects are conditional upon actual content. Exposure to news outlets with high levels of political content (such as public television news and broadsheet newspapers) contributes the most to knowledge gains and increases the propensity to turn out to vote. Exposure to news outlets with less political content has either no effects or slightly positive effects, depending on the type of content. In other words, the effects of news media use on knowledge and participation are rather ‘virtuous’ than ‘vicious’. The results are discussed in the light of research on media effects and political participation.

/pdf/news-political-knowledge-and-participation-the-differential-79bdjp2y9n.pdf

News, Political Knowledge and Participation: The Differential Effects of News Media Exposure on Political Knowledge and Participation

https://ropresearch.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/202708.pdf

Explaining the rise of anti-immigrant parties: The role of news media content

This article analyzes the news coverage of the 2004 European Parliamentary
(EP) elections in all 25 member states of the European Union (EU). It
provides a unique pan-European overview of the campaign coverage based
on an analysis of three national newspapers and two television newscasts in
the two weeks leading up to the elections. On average, the elections were
more visible in the new 10 member states than in the 15 old EU member
states. The political personalities and institutional actors featured in news
stories about the elections were generally national political actors and not EU
actors. When it was evaluative, the news in the old EU-15 was generally
negative towards the EU, while in the new countries a mixed pattern was
found. The findings of the study are discussed in the light of the literature on
the EU’s legitimacy and communication deficit.

/pdf/the-news-coverage-of-the-2004-european-parliamentary-3z9fnb7t6h.pdf

Hajo G. Boomgaarden

Papers

Mapping EU attitudes: Conceptual and empirical dimensions of Euroscepticism and EU support

The news coverage of the 2004 European Parliamentary Election Campaign in 25 countries

News, Political Knowledge and Participation: The Differential Effects of News Media Exposure on Political Knowledge and Participation

Explaining the rise of anti-immigrant parties: The role of news media content

The News Coverage of the 2004 European Parliamentary Election Campaign in 25 Countries