What do citizens say about Europe? Before the crisis of 2008 citizens in Britain, France and Francophone Belgium were 'overlooking' Europe by ignoring it in favour of globalisation, economic flows, and crises of political corruption. Innovative focus group methods allow analysis of the nature of their reactions and positions, and demonstrate how euroscepticism is a red herring. Instead they articulate indifference to and ambivalence about Europe contrasting with activists who engage in conflict about European issues. The analysis shows national and social differences. French projection contrasts with British exteriorisation and Belgian incorporation. The social gap is not a matter of deficits: workers have real arguments about issues close to home while managers show more concern about European politics.This book is part of the qualitative turn in European studies and both complements and challenges established knowledge on European attitudes.

This book analyses the aesthetic and utopian dimensions of various activist social movements in Western Europe since 1989. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates how dreams of a better society have manifested themselves in contexts of political confrontation, and how artistic forms have provided a language to express the collective desire for social change. The study begins with the 1993 occupation of Claremont Road in east London, an attempt to prevent the demolition of homes to make room for a new motorway. In a squatted row of houses, all available space was transformed and filled with elements that were both aesthetic and defensive - so when the authorities arrived to evict the protestors, sculptures were turned into barricades. At the end of the decade, this kind of performative celebration merged with the practices of the antiglobalisation movement, where activists staged spectacular parallel events alongside the global elite's international meetings. As this book shows, social movements try to erase the distance that separates reality and political desire, turning ordinary people into creators of utopias. Squatted houses, carnivalesque street parties, counter-summits, and camps in central squares, all create a physical place of these utopian visions

Two original national surveys were conducted to examine the differences between mass and elite opinion regarding the policy making decisions of the Supreme Court in the area of criminal procedure. The results of the surveys indicate that those who have obtained a legal education are generally more protective of civil libertarian ideals. However, at times, when the Supreme Court has decided against what would be considered the civil libertarian alternative, lawyers are actually less civil libertarian than the rest of the mass public. Among the mass public, knowledge and education did not play as prominent a role in shaping opinions as did demographic variables. The survey results indicate that divergent opinions regarding the root causes of crime account for the differences in opinion regarding police methods in apprehending potential defendants. Most surprising, and most significant, is that contrary to reports in the mass media, the mass public is relatively protective of civil liberties. Professor Lock then proposes approaches whereby the courts and the legal profession can work to develop an even more supportive mass public. A study of particular importance to students, scholars, and public policy makers in the areas of constitutional and criminal law and public opinion.

Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Rush Limbaugh Show, National Public Radio - a list of available political media sources could continue without any apparent end. This book investigates how people navigate these choices. It asks whether people are using media sources that express political views matching their own, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. By looking at newspaper, cable news, news magazine, talk radio, and political website use, this book offers the most comprehensive look to-date at the extent to which partisanship influences our media selections. Using data from numerous surveys and experiments, the results provide broad evidence about the connection between partisanship and news choices. This book also examines who seeks out likeminded media and why they do it. Perceptions of partisan biases in the media vary - sources that seem quite biased to some don't seem so biased to others. These perceptual differences provide insight into why some people select politically likeminded media - a phenomenon that is democratically consequential. On one hand, citizens may become increasingly divided from using media that coheres with their political beliefs. In this way, partisan selective exposure may result in a more fragmented and polarized public. On the other hand, partisan selective exposure may encourage participation and understanding. Likeminded partisan information may inspire citizens to participate in politics and help them to organize their political thinking. But, ultimately, the partisan use of niche news has some troubling effects. It is vital that we think carefully about the implications both for the conduct of media research and, more broadly, for the progress of democracy.

Based on interviews with political decision-makers involved in post-Cold War case studies, this research reassesses the prevalent conclusion in the academic literature, according to which American public opinion has limited influence on military interventions, by including the level of commitment in the study of the decision-making process.

An intriguing analysis of the economy's influence on popular support for the incumbent American presidents in the post World War II period.

When voter turnout is high, Democrats have an advantage-or so the truism goes. But, it is true? In The Turnout Myth, Daron Shaw and John Petrocik refute the widely held convention that high voter participation benefits Democrats while low involvement helps Republicans. The authors examine over 50 years of presidential, gubernatorial, Senatorial, and House election data to show that there is no consistent partisan effect associated with voter turnout in national elections. Instead, less-engaged citizens' responses to short-term forces-candidate appeal, issues, scandals, and the like-determine election turnout. Moreover, Republican and Democratic candidates are equally affected by short-term forces. The consistency of these effects suggests that partisan conflict over eligibility, registration, and voting rules and regulations is less important for election outcomes than both sides seem to believe. Featuring powerful evidence and analytical acumen, this book provides a new foundation for thinking about U.S. elections.

This timely contribution pulls no punches and views the UK as institutionally Eurosceptic across politics and society, from the press to defence. It represents a rich and original contribution to the emerging field of Eurosceptic studies, and a key contribution to this important issue.

The editor of this work argues that the contemporary American political scene is increasingly driven by populist demands. This is the only book on American Politics which outlines this trend. Using primary sources and analyses from government and the media, the book examines the many aspects from all points of the political spectrum, of populism. It is divided into three sections, covering economic, cultural, and governmental populism. Each section contains unique stories, told through informative reporting, reasoned analysis, and passionate oratory. Freed from the traditional ideological conceptions of American politics, this work allows the reader to understand the diverse nature of contemporary populism.

Notable advances resulting from new research findings, measurement approaches, widespread uses of the Internet, and increasingly sophisticated approaches to sampling and polling, have stimulated a new generation of attitude scholars. This extensively revised edition captures this excitement, while remaining grounded in scholarly research.
"Attitudes and Opinions, 3/e" maintains one of the main goals of the original edition--breadth of coverage. The book thoroughly reviews both implicit and explicit measures of attitudes, the structure and function of attitudes, the nature of public opinion and polling, attitude formation, communication of attitudes and opinions, and the relationship between attitudes and behaviors, as well as theories and research on attitude change. Over 2,000 references support the book's scientific integrity. The authors' second goal is to demonstrate the relevance of the topic to people's lives. Subsequently, the second part of the book examines many of the topics and research findings that are salient in the world today--political and international attitudes (including terrorism), voting behavior, racism and prejudice, sexism and gender roles, and environmental attitudes.
This thoroughly revised new edition features:
*an entirely new chapter on implicit measures attitudes;
*a new chapter on environmental attitudes;
*updated opinion poll data throughout the book;
*additional material on time trends in attitudes about many issues; and
*expanded, updated sections on international attitudes reflecting the events of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Attitudes and Opinions'" broad and interdisciplinary perspectivemakes this an ideal text in courses on attitudes, public opinion, survey research, or persuasion, taught in a variety of departments including psychology, communication, marketing, sociology, and political science.

Polls are at their best as indicators of public opinion when they allow comparisons over extended periods of time. Yet all too often changes in question working and in questionnare content make over-time comparisons impossible. This work overcomes this difficulty by bringing together for the first time a compendium of results using identically worded questions on a wide range of social, political, and economic topics of importance to the American people. Chapter introductions summarize trends in the various areas surveyed and discuss problems of interpretation. The chapters on political behavior and attitudes present findings on party identification, political tolerance, voting, civil liberties, international affairs, and related issues. Chapters on work, the family, and sexuality cover such topics as job prestige and satisfaction, the role of women, divorce, family size, sex education, abortion, premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality, and pornography. Other issues addressed include crime and violence, race, death and dying, life style, and general attitudes toward life. Trend analysis based on General Social Surveys conducted regularly by The National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago since 1972 is supplemented by data from 25 other sources extending as far back as the 1930s. The questions chosen are meaningful and standardized and have been asked in interviews over a significant period. Survey results are displayed in a highly readable format that facilitates comparisons over time. An appropriate choice for the library reference collection, this book is a valuable research tool and source for scholars in political science, psychology, and sociology, as well as journalists, policy makers, and other professionals concerned with public opinion.

This is a highly innovative and stimulating work with the outline of an entirely new approach to massive and rapid shifts in opinion and communication. It discusses and explains such mysterious phenomena as sudden crazes and crashes, fads and fashion, hypes and manias, moral outrage and protests, gossip and rumors, and scares and panics.
Rich in alternative insights, the book is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the points of departure: the most relevant processes of opinion formation and communication. Part II is about phenomena on three different levels, that have traditionally been studied within the twin fields of mass psychology and collective behavior sociology. Part III focuses on the three prime forms of "emotional coloring" of opinion currents and public moods. Part IV discusses a combination of some of the aforementioned phenomena: successive crazes and crashes in financial markets, and looks at why technological and economic, and social and opinion forecasts often fail so miserably.
The audience for this book includes students of social and mass psychology, social movements and collective behavior sociology, and opinion and communication in general. Professionals in public relations, marketing, health, finance, and politics, as well as the educated lay audience, will also find this book of interest.

The text is technically precise but at the same time accessible, and is carried forward by numerous examples. The chapters focus on vote counting rules, voting agendas, voter preferences, sincere and sophisticated voting strategies, solution sets, voting outcomes, agendas control, and agenda formation. The author himself has made prior research contributions to a number of these topics.

This book illuminates, and ultimately defends, attitudinal hypocrisy within the personal politics of Americans by utilizing statistical analyses within political history, social psychology, public opinion, and political science. Within a simple and parsimonious model of political attitudes, along with a novel method of calculating and operationalizing what attitudinal hypocrisy is, the book argues that the wielding of conflicting attitudes is a necessary characteristic of the American electorate. It uses an innovative multidisciplinary approach to answer some of the most pervasive questions in American politics: Why do conservatives preach the value of economic libertarianism, but decry the lack of government involvement in social issues and the military? Why do liberals extol the virtues of a regulatory economic state, but not a cultural or military state?

Social exclusion of minority groups is an intractable problem in many diverse nations. For some minority groups this means going to segregated schools, for others not having access to gainful employment or quality healthcare. But why does social exclusion persist, and what can one do to stop it? This book proposes a theory of how individual behavior contributes to social exclusion, a novel method for measuring that behavior, and solutions to ending it. Based on original fieldwork among Central and Eastern European Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Europe (yet still very understudied), and non-Roma, Ana Bracic develops a theory she calls the exclusion cycle, through which anti-minority culture gives rise to discrimination by members of the majority, and minority members develop survival strategies. Members of the majority resent these strategies, assuming that they are endemic to the minority group rather than an outcome of their own discriminatory behavior. To illustrate her theory, Bracic includes an analysis of a video game she created that simulates interactions between Roma and non-Roma participants, which members of these groups played through avatars (thereby avoiding contentious face-to-face interactions). The results demonstrate that majority members discriminate against minority members even when minority group members behave in ways identical to the majority. It also shows the way in which minority members develop survival mechanisms. Bracic draws on the results of the simulation to offer evidence that this cycle can be broken through NGO-promoted discussion and interaction between groups. She also draws on extant scholarship on interactions between Muslim women in France, African Americans, the Batwa in Uganda, and their respective majority communities.

This straightforward text provides journalists, both professional and student, with an explanation of the realities of an increasingly important facet of today's precision journalism--public opinion polling. The work aims to provide the skills necessary for evaluating and interpreting survey results accurately. After a brief review of the historical relationship between the press and public opinion, the authors examine the polling environment today. Then, step-by-step, they take the reader through the basics of journalistic uses of public opinion surveys and the questions to be asked by the journalist in evaluating a survey: who did the poll; who sponsored the poll; what were the survey questions and how were they worded; what is the sampling error; how to report poll results; how to put survey figures in context; and how to make and evaluate projections based upon polls. In addition, the text offers a review of statistical methods for the journalist and a 20 question checklist.

This book uses a multi-method approach to explain why recent Iowa governors have been able to stay in office significantly longer than their peers. Voters in Iowa value a personal connection with their governor and those governors who ignore that expectation are held accountable at the polls.

There is a perceived North-South divide in British politics. In this study, William Field points out that this divide marks the resurgence of a core-periphery cleavage which was also dominant in British politics in the years before 1914. He shows how similar the geographical pattern of the vote was in the general election of 1989 to that in the two general elections of 1910, the last before the outbreak of World War I. Many of the same constitution issues - devolution and reform of the second chamber were coming to the fore then.

The study of elections, voting behavior and public opinion are arguably among the most prominent and intensively researched sub-fields within Political Science. It is an evolving sub-field, both in terms of theoretical focus and in particular, technical developments and has made a considerable impact on popular understanding of the core components of liberal democracies in terms of electoral systems and outcomes, changes in public opinion and the aggregation of interests. This handbook details the key developments and state of the art research across elections, voting behavior and the public opinion by providing both an advanced overview of each core area and engaging in debate about the relative merits of differing approaches in a comprehensive and accessible way. Bringing geographical scope and depth, with comparative chapters that draw on material from across the globe, it will be a key reference point both for advanced level students and researchers developing knowledge and producing new material in these sub-fields and beyond. The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion is an authoritative and key reference text for students, academics and researchers engaged in the study of electoral research, public opinion and voting behavior.

This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. In doing do, the book argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the everyday repertoires of citizens and their organisations. Within the digitally-enabled shift in individual acts of participation, creating, signing and sharing online petitions and micro-donations have become a focal point because of the clear evolution from their offline and online counterparts. To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original nationally representative survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Additionally, through detailed interviews and analysis of their web presence they show how advocacy organisations use online petitions within their repertoire of strategic actions. Lastly, they analyse the kinds of policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, based on a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. They contrast these mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day to show there is a disjuncture and general lack of responsiveness to this form of citizen expression.

Since Nimmo and Savage's groundbreaking work, "Candidates and Their Images" (1976), there has been no book dedicated solely to the examination of political candidate images. This volume adds to the development of the candidate image construct initiated by Nimmo and Savage. It provides a compendium of state-of-the-art theory and research of candidate images and image formation in the U.S. presidential elections. The contributors to this work, among the best-known in the field of political communication, describe and explain how presidential election results hinge on voter perceptions of candidates and how candidates seek to construct images that attract the most votes. The volume integrates issues of voter decision-making, media messages, campaigning, debate effects, and political advertising into the development of political communication theory. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of political communication.

This timely book investigates Black-Jewish estrangement and the erosion of Black support for Israel. Topics such as the response of Afro-Americans to the early Zionist movement; the emergence of the Jewish state in the Middle East; the attitudes of such Black luminaries as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Edward Wilmot Blyden; and Black reactions to the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 are chronicled and analyzed. The normalization of relations between Israel and the Republic of South Africa in recent years is examined along with Israel's ties with Black African countries, links between Arab and African nations and South Africa, and alleged Israeli military and nuclear collaboration with the apartheid regime. Another chapter looks at the friction between the Israeli government and a sect of Black Hebrew Israelites from the United States who settled in the Negev and at Black American involvement in the matter. The considerable effect that clashes over domestic questions, most notably affirmative action, have had on Black perceptions is also considered, as is the controversy between Jesse Jackson and the Jewish community.

The 1983-84 Index documents international opinion on problems such as terrorism, the continuing crisis in the Middle East, global economic imbalances, the conventional and nuclear arms races, and nuclear disarmament. Extensive coverage of the 1984 United States presidential elections, particularly the Democratic Party primaries, is provided. International surveys on such diverse subjects as job stress among managerial personnel, the Olympic Games, trust and cooperation between France and Germany, and the attitudes of Europeans toward nuclear weapons are included.

This seventh volume of the annual Index to International Public Opinion contains data from public opinion polls conducted primarily from the spring of 1984 through the first half of 1985 in all major regions of the world. Over one hundred and fifty-nation states are represented. The data published in this series are selected because of their widespread and continuing interest to professional researchers and the public-at-large. Much of the data is not only of current interest, but also deals with problems and issues that are of persistent concern and transcend geographical barriers.