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Civil society organizations (CSOs) are a cornerstone of democracy in Europe. Nonetheless, "civil society" and "political society" should not be equated as membership-based organizations are not necessarily politically engaged. This paper theorizes and empirically examines which membership-based CSOs engage in interest representation through sustained advocacy activity. We propose an incentive-theoretical framework on CSO investments in advocacy activities—a collective, non-exclusive incentive from which also non-members can profit—by organizations fundamentally dependent on member support. Theorizing how CSOs' own structural characteristics, resource dependencies, and government demand for CSO input affect how CSOs reconcile selective and collective incentive provision, we test our hypotheses using new data from four recent surveys conducted in four European democracies. In line with our framework, CSOs organizing individual citizens rather than corporate actors and those pursuing member interests are less likely to engage in advocacy, while CSO professionalization and state funding access enhance CSOs' propensities to do so. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the former structural CSO characteristics are similarly relevant for CSO advocacy across distinct country settings, while the role of resource variables is mediated by institutional context revealing an important source of inequality in democratic interest representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the more parliamentary questions on that issue are asked. The relationship, however, is mediated by the issue agenda of mass media more generally, attesting to an indirect rather than a direct effect. Additionally, the effect of media-covered protests on the general media agenda is moderated by the political system and is larger in majoritarian countries than in countries with a consensus democracy. This shows the importance of political opportunity structures for the agenda-setting impact of protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though called a world war, the war of 1914-18 was, largely a European conflict which due to the increasingly intricate inter-relationships of modem life had repercussions far beyond its actual locale. While offering an unmistakable indication that in all spheres of man's activity an event occurring in any part of the world has a greater or lesser effect upon all other parts, that war was yet essentially a provincial war compared to the global conflict in which Alaska and Madagascar, Hunan province and Dakar, the Solomon Islands and the Caucasus, Norway and the Caribbean Sea are locked in the intricate maze of grand strategy. Upon students of history the effect of the earlier conflict was for the most part restricted to a search after causes or origins. The aim varied from that of placing the blame upon one nation or group of nations to the more philosophical effort to relate the already generally accepted concepts of nineteenth century history, industrialism, imperialism, nationalism, democracy, etc., into some pattern such that the inevitable result would appear to be the conflict which followed.