This lecture concerns the triangular relationship between education, technology and citizenship. It proceeds from the premise that technological societies pose special challenges for citizenship, and that education — historically understood to be necessary for the cultivation of citizenship — plays a particular role in response to these challenges. Does the role imagined for education in so-called "knowledge-based society" attend adequately to the problem of citizenship in technological society? This lecture critically explores a number of philosophical and practical approaches to addressing.

The Morning After: Citizen Engagement in Technological Society. Technē: Research in Philosophy and Technology 9 (3): 23-31.
Darin Barney (2006)

Politics and Emerging Media: The Revenge of Publicity. Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition. 1 (1): 89-106.
Darin Barney (2008)

Emerging media technologies and applications have accompanied by an explosion of diverse means and practices for engaging in public life, raising the possibility of an invigorated and improved democratic politics. Investment in this possibility is premised on acceptance of the norms associated with publicity, specifically access to information and enhanced communication. Starting from the premise that democracy is a term whose defining attributes are best understood as the politicization of moral and ethical questions and equality (as opposed to a characteristic set of procedures and practices), the discussion in this paper investigates the potential for democratic participation via Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook and other social networking sites. What emerges from this exercise is the recognition that within the contemporary context, information, communication and participation stand-in for motivation, judgment and action when it comes to democratic politics. This implies, in turn, that we may be settling for publicity in the place of the more the demanding democratic goods of politicization and equality. Somewhat more ominously, the popular embrace of these surrogates via emerging media technologies may actually undermine the prospect of a politics aimed at more radical outcomes.

Education and Citizenship in the Digital Age. Technē: Research in Philosophy and Technology 9 (1): 1-7.
Darin Barney and Aaron Gordon (2005)

The Rational Public? A Canadian Test of the Page and Shapiro Argument. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 17 (2): 190-212.
Éric Bélanger and François Pétry (2005)

Legislative Priorities and Public Opinion: Representation of Partisan Agendas in the Canadian House of Commons. Journal of European Public Policy 13 (7): 1006-1020.
Erin Penner, Kelly Blidook, and Stuart Soroka (2006)

Oral questions are a central feature of the Canadian parliamentary system, and a valuable indication of legislators’ issue attentiveness. Here, we consider parties’ behaviour in Question Period, with a particular interest in opposition parties’ representation of the public’s (and publics’) issue priorities. We do so using a content analytic database of oral questions covering three Parliaments from 1988 to 1999. We begin with some descriptive analyses of the distribution of oral questions across issues and parties, and then explore what drives parties’ attention to issues. Combining the oral questions database with public opinion data, we examine the relationship between the issue priorities of both parties and partisans. In doing so, we examine two different foci of representation: a generalized national constituency, and each party’s partisan constituency.

Good News and Bad News: Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information (résumé). The Journal of Politics 68 (2): 372-385.
Stuart N. Soroka (2006)

There is a growing body of work suggesting that responses to positive and negative information are asymmetric—that negative information has a much greater impact on individuals’ attitudes than does positive information. This paper explores these asymmetries in mass media responsiveness to positive and negative economic shifts and in public responsiveness to both the economy itself and economic news coverage. Using time-series analyses of U.K. media and public opinion, strong evidence is found of asymmetry. The dynamic is discussed as it applies to political communications and policymaking and more generally to public responsiveness in representative democracies.

On the Limits to Inequality in Representation (résumé). PS: Political Science and Politics (April): 319-327.
Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien (2008)

Opinion-Policy Dynamics: Public Preferences and Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom. British Journal of Political Science 35: 665-689.
Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien (2005)

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

Public Expenditure in the UK: How Measures Matter. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 169 (Series A): 255-271.
Stuart N. Soroka, Christopher Wlezien, and Iain McLean (2006)

Studying spending over time requires reliable data. It is not clear that such data exist in the UK, however. The two published sources of functional spending numbers—the Office for National Statistics’s ‘blue book’ and Her Majesty’s Treasury’s Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA)—rely on estimates of past spending, using a link year method, rather than recalculating actual spending figures when functional definitions change. We assess the various measures of spending in the UK. Specifically, we do two things. First, we present a new, third, set of spending numbers applying temporally consistent functional definitions to PESA microdata. Second, we compare the three measures. Our analyses indicate that the Office for National Statistics and PESA data differ quite markedly, especially for certain functions, i.e. in some cases the two measures imply completely different histories. The differences between the original PESA data and our new measures are less pronounced on average, though significant differences are evident, especially year by year.

The Mass Media’s Political Agenda-Setting Power: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media, Parliament, and Government in Belgium (1993 to 2000). Comparative Political Studies 41 (6): 814-836.
Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart N. Soroka and Michiel Nuytemans (2008)

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media’s political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for others (foreign policy, economic issues).

BQ In the House: The Nature of Sovereigntist Representation in the Canadian Parliament. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 14 (4): 487-522.
Lori Young and Éric Bélanger (2008)

We address the behavior of separatist parties participating in state legislatures in well-established democracies, taking the Bloc Québécois (BQ) as a case. Analysis of oral questions asked in the Canadian House of Commons reveals a broad set of issues addressed by the BQ; its aggregate priorities comprising many issues of federal concern. It is shown that the BQ’s attention to issues of separation in Question Period mainly follows, rather than leads, public support in Quebec for sovereignty. The party appears on the whole limited in its ability to mobilize public support for sovereignty and to pursue its separatist agenda more rigorously.

Ethnic Diversity and Generalized Trust in Europe: A Cross-National Multilevel Study (résumé). Comparative Political Studies 42 (2): 198-223.
Marc Hooghe, Tim Reeskens, Dietlind Stolle and Ann Trappers (2009)

While most current research documents a negative relation between ethnic diversity and generalized trust, it has to be acknowledged that these results often originate from one-country analyses in North America. In this article, attitudinal measurements from the European Social Survey are combined with Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development data on migration patterns, thus examining the relationship between diversity and trust in a comparative manner across 20 European countries. More fine-grained measurements of diversity (including type and rise of diversity over time and legal status of immigrants) are included in a multilevel model. At the individual level, most of the familiar relations were confirmed. At the country level, hardly any indicators for migration or diversity proved to be strongly and consistently related to generalized trust. Results suggest that the pessimistic conclusions about the negative effects of ethnic diversity on generalized trust cannot be confirmed at the aggregate level across European countries.

When Does Diversity Erode Trust? Neighborhood Diversity, Interpersonal Trust and the Mediating Effect of Social Interactions (résumé). Political Studies 56 (1): 57-75.
Dietlind Stolle, Stuart Soroka and Richard Johnston (2008)

This article contributes to the debate about the effects of ethnic diversity on social cohesion, particularly generalized trust. The analysis relies on data from both the ‘Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy’ (CID) survey in the US and the ‘Equality, Security and Community Survey’ (ESCS) in Canada. Our analysis, one of the first controlled cross-national comparisons of small-unit contextual variation, confirms recent findings on the negative effect of neighborhood diversity on white majorities across the two countries. Our most important finding, however, is that not everyone is equally sensitive to context. Individuals who regularly talk with their neighbors are less influenced by the racial and ethnic character of their surroundings than people who lack such social interaction. This finding challenges claims about the negative effects of diversity on trust – at least, it suggests that the negative effects so prevalent in existing research can be mediated by social ties.

The Cost of Multiculturalism: Does Diversity have a Negative Effect on Social Capital? WZB-Mitteilungen 118: 14-17.
Kenneth Newton and Dietlind Stolle (2007)

RACE AND THE CITY: Neighborhood Context and the Development of Generalized Trust. Political Behavior 26(2): 125-153.
Melissa J. Marschall and Dietlind Stolle (2004)

Previous research has indicated that socio-economic and racial characteristics of an individual’s environment influence not only group consciousness and solidarity, but also affect his or her views toward minority or majority groups. Missing from this research is a consideration of how context, social interaction, and interracial experiences combine to shape more general psychological orientations such as generalized trust. In this study we address this gap in the literature by conducting a neighborhoodlevel analysis that examines how race, racial attitudes, social interactions, and residential patterns affect generalized trust. Our findings suggest not only that the neighborhood context plays an important role in shaping civic orientations, but that the diversity of interaction settings is a key condition for the development of generalized trust.

The Political Resocialization of Immigrants: Resistance or Lifelong Learning? Political Research Quarterly 61(2): 268-281.
Stephen White, Neil Nevitte, André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil and Patrick Fournier (2008)

Theories of political socialization contain competing expectations about immigrants’ potential for political resocialization. Premigration beliefs and actions may be resistant to change, exposure to the new political system may facilitate adaptation, or immigrants may find ways to transfer beliefs and behaviors from one political system to another. This analysis empirically tests these three alternative theories of resocialization. The results indicate that both transfer and exposure matter; there is little evidence that premigration beliefs and actions are resistant to change. Moreover, how immigrants adapt depends on which orientation or behavior is being considered and on what kind of political environments migrants come from.

The Development of Dual Loyalties: Immigrants’ Integration to Regional Canadian Dynamics. Canadian Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).
Antoine Bilodeau, S. White and N. Nevitte (2010)

Adaptation to Democracy among Immigrants in Australia. International Political Science Review (forthcoming).
Antoine Bilodeau, Ian McAllister, and Mebs Kanji (2010)

Immigrants’ Voice through Protest Politics in Canada and Australia: Assessing the Impact of Pre-Migration Political Repression (résumé). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34(6): 975-1002.
Antoine Bilodeau (2008)

This paper examines immigrant participation in protest politics in Canada and Australia. It focuses on the related impact of immigrants’ pre-migration experience of political repression. Three main findings emerge. First, immigrants from repressive regimes abstain more from protest politics than those from non-repressive regimes. Second, the higher the degree of repression in the country of origin, the more likely immigrants are to abstain from protest politics. Third, even after living for 30 years in the host country, some groups of immigrants continue to abstain from protest politics to a greater degree than the local population. This article contributes, therefore, to two understudied aspects of immigrants’ political adaptation: immigrant participation in protest activities and the impact of their pre-migration experiences.

This paper investigates whether immigrants in Australia residing in situations of residential segregation (federal constituencies with high concentrations of immigrants) participate more in electoral politics than other immigrants. The results indicate that immigrants participate more when living in federal constituencies with high concentrations of immigrants and also exhibit greater homogeneity in their partisan preferences. The analysis also indicates that the impact of residential segregation is primarily observed among immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Immigrants from visible minority background, such as those from South East Asia as well as those from Southern and South Eastern Europe, tend to be more strongly affected by the ethnic composition of their constituencies than other immigrants such as those from the United Kingdom and Ireland.

This paper considers judgments based on electoral outcomes, questioning whether a decision on what is 'free and fair' can be related to what results from an electoral competition. It is noted that no one has seriously argued that elections should be deemed free and fair based on the extent to which a specific party has won, although it is possible that the electoral process may be more likely to be found acceptable when the 'ins' are defeated. Such a judgement would be a mistake. The thorny issue of socio-demographic and political party outcomes has produced no consensus, and it is important to remember that electorates remain free to produce outcomes with which we, in our wisdom, might disagree.