E-Democracy and the European Public Sphere

The chapter starts with an outline of outstanding recent contributions to the discussion of the EU democratic deficit and the so-called “no demos” problem and the debate about European citizenship and European identity—mainly in the light of insights from the EU crisis. This is followed by reflections on the recent discussion on the state of the mass media-based European public sphere. Finally, the author discusses the state of research on the Internet’s capacity to support the emergence of a (renewed) public sphere, with a focus on options for political actors to use the Internet for communication and campaigning, on the related establishment of segmented issue-related publics as well as on social media and its two-faced character as an enabler as well as a distorting factor of the public sphere. The author is sceptic about the capacities of Internet-based political communication to develop into a supranational (European) public sphere. It rather establishes a network of a multitude of discursive processes aimed at opinion formation at various levels and on various issues. The potential of online communication to increase the responsiveness of political institutions so far is set into practice insufficiently. Online media are increasingly used in a vertical and scarcely in a horizontal or interactive manner of communication

When and How Does Europe Matter? Higher Education Policy Change in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

The study underlying this article investigatesthe factors under which European policy initiatives with respect to higher education (HE), such as the Bologna Process, lead to policy change at the national level. In theoretical terms, it uses institutionalist approaches to the Europeanization of public policy developed in thefields of comparative politics and international relations. The empirical focus is on HE policy changes in three countries of former Yugoslavia from 1990 onwards. More specifically, the focus is on changes of policy goals, normative basis and instruments with regard toquality assurance. A process-tracing approach based on document analysis and interviews with policy actors is used to safeguard against overestimating the influence of European initiatives on national policy change. What matters for European influences on national policy changes are clarity of European initiatives and consequences of non-compliance, as well as density of veto players in the domestic policy context. While legitimacy of European initiatives, the strength of domestic institutional legacies and the participation of domestic actors in the European epistemic communities may also be conducive to European influence on national policy change, the study identifies points where better operationalization and further research in relation to these factors are necessary

How U.S. decision-makers assessed their control of multilateral organizations, 1957–1982

United States, Influence, Control, Informal, Side payments, History, “Soft” power, Constructivist theories, Archival research, Declassified documents, F53, F55, F59, N400, N420,