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This paper deals with consistency of opinions of youth in Belgium, Canada and Romania. The arguments of the paper are that youth display consistency of their preferences on issues like diversity, role of state on the market and homosexual marriages and these are affected by political interest and time spent on television, internet or watching, listening or reading news. The study employs three levels of complexity of consistency: consistency of issues within the same issue dimension, ideological consistency, and ideological consistency that resists the test of time in order to discover instances in which youth is consistent with their preferences. The conclusions of this study is that youth display a higher than expected consistency of issues in all three countries. Ideological consistency tests reveal that Canadian and Romanian youth have consistent preferences with what left and right means in their respective polity. Longitudinal survey of preferences of youth in Romania does not reveal changes in consistency. The issues on which Romanian youth express preferences in a panel study are not linked with their left-right self placement. The study did find a minuscule effect of internet and television on consistency. However the effects dissipated for ideological consistency. Hypotheses were tested using a comparative survey of Romanian, Canadian and Belgian youth ages 15 to 16 from 2006, a panel survey of Romanian youth from 2006 and 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, various voluntary associations and political organizations have increasingly relied on internet-based mobilization campaigns, replacing traditional forms of face-to-face recruitment and mobilization. Within the literature, one can observe an intensive debate about the possible consequences of this transition. Most importantly, the question is whether mobilization through the Internet will lead to more effective political engagement mobilization? In this paper, we report on a mobilization experiment using both traditional (face-to-face) and modern (website, interactive website) incentives for mobilization. The experiment was conducted among university students in Belgium and Canada. Results suggest that the internet is quite successful in transferring knowledge and raising awareness among respondents. We do not find any indication that internet based mobilization would be less effective than more traditional, face-to-face forms of mobilization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the results of a comparative survey on political attitudes and behaviors among adolescents in Belgium, Canada and Romania. The results show that while political interest and trust is highest among Canadian adolescents, it is lowest among Romanian respondents. A preliminary analysis suggest that the impact of parents and of schools remains overwhelming. Despite the rise of a new and more autonomous youth culture, therefore, most of the findings from the older literature of the 1970s still is confirmed. The study also points to the possible effects of civic education in schools.Multivariate models prove to be most performative for Canada and for Belgium and least for Romania. This might be due to the fact that political trust and engagement levels are lowest in Romania. This hints at the fact that, even 17 years after the end of the authoritarian regime in Romania, political socialization of young adolescents is still being influenced by the impact of a previous political era.We close with a number of suggestions for further and more stringent analyses of the current data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]