Two projects from the EUROCORES ECRP 2007 Competition were funded. You will find below the abstracts of the projects as well as the lists of Project Leaders, Principal Investigators and Associate Partners.
Abstract: It is widely recognized that politics in West Europe has undergone dramatic changes with the decline of class voting, increased importance of mass media etc. However, many aspects of contemporary politics are poorly understood. This relates especially to the issue supply of politics or the allocation of attention from different political actors to different issues. How do politicians interact with mass media and other political actors to provide a supply of politics to the electorate? To what extent has this supply converged and to what extent does it represent the issue priorities of the electorate?
Drawing on the booming American policy agendas literature, this project develops a comprehensive theoretical framework that makes it possible to integrate the role of different actors such as mass media, governments, and political parties in forming the supply of politics. It also provides data to study the allocation of attention to different issues in a much more systematic way than has been done before. The subprojects take up different questions with regard to the supply of politics focusing on either issues, actors, or institutions but share the same theoretical framework and methodology. Project website: http://www.comparativeagendas.org/
Abstract: Citizenship after the Nation-State? is the first project to gather in a systematic and rigorous way comparative data on public attitudes at the regional level. It will administer a survey to a standard methodology and timescale in 21 regions in seven European states. It will pinpoint how far citizenship - as expressed in political participation and social solidarity - has become ‘denationalised’ or 'regionalised', that is rescaled at the regional level, thus challenging established frames of reference focused on a national scale of citizenship in the postwar nation-state. It tests competing theoretical explanations for the regionalisation of citizenship based in variables of regional identity, the powers of regional government, and regional economic disparity. By testing alternative explanatory accounts of regionalisation of citizenship empirically and modelling their causal relationships with one another the project opens up scope for theory development that would not be possible in smaller scale national/bilateral projects. The findings will be disseminated in national and cross-national settings and the data will be deposited as soon as possible for general access. The research will be carried out by seven national teams with substantial past experience of collaboration, and will be supported by a coordinating office in the UK.
Project (preliminary) website: www.pol.ed.ac.uk/epop/research/citizenship_after_the_nation_state