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Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB Altres ajuts: Fundació ICREA This article contends that sexism plays a fundamental role in the electoral rise of the far right, both as a predisposition and as a changing attitude. Using panel data from Spain, we show that modern sexism is indeed among the most important attitudinal predictors of voting for the far-right party Vox. The results also show that internal individual changes in levels of modern sexism impact far-right voting. Backlash attitudinal change, defined as increases in sexism occurring in a context of feminist momentum, contributed significantly to the recent emergence of the radical right. Our findings indicate that sexism is not a crystalized attitude but rather susceptible to showing short-term changes with important political consequences. This highlights the importance of understudied context-dependent individual dynamics of gender backlash in far-right voting.

A strong argument can be made for the prime importance of information in the context of an economic recession. It is in times of crisis that information on the state of the economy is abundant and citizens have incentives to acquire it in order to sanction incumbents for mismanagement of the economy. Simultaneously, however, economic hardship strains people's cognitive resources and motivations to seek relevant information. Using a novel research design, we assess how the recent economic recession has shaped information acquisition. Our results indicate that while personal economic hardship depresses levels of information, the recession overall boosted considerably the public's knowledge of the state of the economy and, to a lesser degree, of parties' policy positions in elections. For both economic and electoral types of information, economically marginal groups caught up to the economically secure in contexts of economic hardship, thereby reducing information inequalities. We discuss the findings' implications for representative democracy.

This research analyzes how different types of frames adopted by news organizations and social media affected the support for protests against austerity measures in Spain. We pay special attention to the individual understandings of the crises based on materialistic grievances and nonmaterialistic accounts of the economic crises. We identified frames using a supervised approach and a data set of 2 million tweets gathered during the major demonstrations of the Indignados Movement between 2011 and 2013. Our second data set included the news-related content published by the top Spanish newspapers, in terms of circulation, during those demonstrations. We found that support for antiausterity protests was conditioned by understandings of the crisis. Frames addressing the political system were negatively related to the support for protests against austerity measures, as compared with those referring to the crisis as an economic matter. In addition, more challenging and controversial frames generated lower acceptance of the protests among the population than those that primed social problems.

This article addresses the psychological dynamics between internal political efficacy, emotions and support for populism. Contrary to the extended idea that populism is associated with low levels of political competence, it is argued that individuals' self-competence beliefs enhance populist attitudes. Individuals who conceive themselves as able to understand and participate effectively in politics are more critical towards politicians and more prone to consider that citizens could do a better job. The article also hypothesises that internal efficacy enhances the likelihood of experiencing anger, which in turn promotes populist attitudes. Experimental and comparative observational evidence shows robust direct effects of internal efficacy over populism, as well as a smaller indirect impact via feelings of anger. These findings raise important questions regarding the nature of populism and how to fight it in our emancipated and information-intensive democratic systems.

This paper analyzes individuals’ adoption of populist attitudes in nine European countries in the wake of the Great Recession. We assess the consequences of three different, interrelated aspects of economic hardship that are expected to foster the development of populist attitudes at the individual level: vulnerability, grievances, and perceptions of the national economic situation. Using comparative survey data, we find effects of all three of these individual aspects. Our analysis suggests that the main explanation for populist attitudes is neither the vulnerability nor the economic hardship suffered by the people, but rather the perceptions that citizens have about the economic situation in their country. Using panel data from Spain, we address concerns about the presence of endogeneity in the relationship between economic perceptions and populism and conclude that the effect goes mostly from economic perceptions to populist attitudes, not the other way around.

Altres ajuts: Ramon y Cajal (RYC-2012-09861) Popular accounts of populist movements often point to negative emotions as a key motivating factor underlying their support. However, little systematic research has been devoted to examining differences in how distinct negative emotions affect levels of populism among voters. This paper attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the influence of the two emotions most frequently connected to populism in political commentary: fear and anger. Informed by appraisal theories of emotions, we hypothesize that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of anger, rather than fear. Using a three-wave online panel survey of Spanish citizens between 2014 and 2016, we find that anger expressed over the economic crisis is consistently associated with variations in support for populism both between individuals and over time, whereas no significant effects emerge for expressions of fear. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the nature of populist support.

This article analyses the relationship between populist attitudes and political participation. We argue that populist attitudes can be a motivation for participation through their identity, emotional, and moral components, and that they have the potential to narrow socioeconomic gaps in participation. Using survey data from nine European countries, our results show that populist attitudes are positively related to expressive non-institutionalized modes of participation (petition signing, online participation and, in some contexts, demonstrating), but not to turnout. In addition, populist attitudes are found to reduce education-based gaps and even reverse income-based inequalities in political participation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Altres ajuts: Programa RecerCaixa (la Caixa i ACUP) Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents' predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.

In this article we analyze the effects of election salience on affective polarization. Campaigns and elections epitomize the moment of maximum political conflict, information spread, mobilization, and activation of political identities and predispositions. We therefore expect that affective polarization will be higher just after an election has taken place. By the same token, as elections lose salience, affective polarization will diminish. We analyze this question using CSES data from 99 post-electoral surveys conducted in 42 countries between 1996 and 2016. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of survey interviews with respect to the election day as an exogenous measure of election salience. The empirical findings indicate that as elections lose salience affective polarization declines. The article further contributes to the debate on the origins of affective polarization by exploring two mechanisms that may account for this relationship: changes in ideological polarization and in the intensity of party identification. Both are relevant mediators, with ideological polarization seemingly playing a more important role.

We examine the visibility of the European Union (EU) in the national public spheres of nine European countries during the period 2008-14, inquiring whether the impact of the recent economic crisis and the austerity policies have advanced the presence of the EU, its member states, and European concerns, or not. Using political claims analysis, we map the visibility of collective actors in the main national newspapers of France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Despite the overall limited presence of the EU and European subjects, we find meaningful differences among countries. First, Germany's leading position conveying visibility to European claims, followed by Greece, Italy, and France. In contrast, negligible levels of visibility of the EU in the United Kingdom and Switzerland along with general low levels in the remaining selected countries, even in those most severely hit by the recent economic crisis and under EU surveillance. Related Articles in this Special Issue Zamponi, Lorenzo, and Lorenzo Bosi. 2016. “Which Crisis? European Crisis and National Contexts in Public Discourse.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 400–426. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12156/abstract Lahusen, Christian, Maria Kousis, Johannes Kiess, and Maria Paschou. 2016. “Political Claims and Discourse Formations: A Comparative Account on Germany and Greece in the Eurozone Crisis.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 525–552. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12162/abstract Cinalli, Manlio, and Marco Giugni. 2016. “Collective Responses to the Economic Crisis in the Public Domain: Myth or Reality?” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 427–446. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12159/abstract Related Media de Vreese, Claes. 2014. “Understanding the Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Shaping Today's European Citizenship.” European Public Sphere Conference April 10-11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkCkFVCxIJs&feature=youtu.be City University London. 2016. “Context Matters.” News. Arts & Culture. Series: Research Spotlight. Accessed on March 17, 2016. http://www.city.ac.uk/news/spotlight-on-research/context-matters En este estudio analizamos la prominencia de la Union Europea en la esfera publica nacional de nueve paises europeos durante el periodo 2008-14, para determinar si el impacto de la reciente crisis economica y las politicas de austeridad han servido para aumentar la presencia de la UE, sus estados miembros, y las preocupaciones europeas, o no. Usando un analisis de discurso politico, se mapea la visibilidad de actores colectivos en los principales diarios de Francia, Alemania, Grecia, Italia, Polonia, Espana, Suecia, Suiza y el Reino Unido. A pesar de la limitada presencia de la UE y temas europeos, encontramos diferencias significativas entre los paises. Primero, la posicion de liderazgo de Alemania que otorga visibilidad a los temas europeos, seguida de Grecia, Italia y Francia. En contraste, se observaron bajos niveles de visibilidad de la UE en el Reino Unido y Suiza, asi como niveles generalmente bajos en el resto de los paises seleccionados, incluso si estos se encuentran bajo escrutinio de la UE y fueron severamente afectados por la reciente crisis economica.

The chapter analyses the consequences of the economic recession in Spain for the development of populist attitudes and the appearance of a left-wing populist party, Podemos. In the first section, we contextualise the Spanish case and we show that Podemos’ voters are the ones that hold highest levels of populist attitudes. In the second section, we analyse economic and political correlates of populist attitudes among the citizenry. We show that income, sociotropic evaluations of the national economy, political sophistication, being left-wing oriented, and not being close to the incumbent are positively related to populist attitudes. In the last section, we use populist attitudes to explain vote choice and show that Podemos was the party most affected by these attitudes in the 2015 election.

Fil: Castanho Silva, Bruno. University of Cologne; Alemania Fil: Andreadis, Ioannis. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Grecia Fil: Eva, Anduiza. Autonomous University of Barcelona; España Fil: Blanuša, Nebojša. University of Zagreb; Croacia Fil: Morlet Corti, Yazmin. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; México Fil: Delfino, Gisela. Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina; Argentina Fil: Delfino, Gisela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Rico, Guillem. Autonomous University of Barcelona; España Fil: Ruth, Saskia P. University of Zurich; Suiza Fil: Spruyt, Bram. Free University of Brussels; Bélgica Fil: Steenbergen, Marco. University of Zurich; Suiza Fil: Littvay, Levente. Central European University; Hungría Abstract: In recent years, scholars have started to measure and explain populism at the micro-level, as an attitude that individuals hold about politics. Multiple scales have been proposed but, as the overview by Van Hauwaert et al. indicates, they all have limitations. Most do not capture a broad range of the phenomenon – being able to discriminate only among moderately populist and moderately not-populist individuals – and have little cross-cultural validity. Starting out with 145 items, we have used standard scale-development approaches from psychology to produce a short battery of six to nine indicators measuring populist attitudes, divided into three dimensions. The scale has conceptual breadth, and travels well across 18 samples collected in 14 different countries from Europe and the Americas.

Corruption cases have limited electoral consequences in many countries. Why do voters often fail to punish corrupt politicians at the polls? Previous research has focused on the role of lack of information, weak institutions and partisanship in explaining this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose three micro-mechanisms that can help understand why voters support corrupt mayors even in contexts with high information and strong institutions: implicit exchange (good performance can make up for corruption), credibility of information (accusations from opposition parties are not credible) and the lack of credible alternatives (the belief that all politicians are corrupt). We test these mechanisms using three survey experiments conducted in Catalonia. Our results suggest that implicit exchange and credibility of information help explain voters’ support for corrupt politicians. Support for this research was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [research grant CSO2010-18534].

A long-standing puzzle in electoral research is why the disproportionality of electoral systems has a negative effect on voter participation in established democracies, but not in new democracies. We propose a learning theory of electoral system’s effects, and test it in a cross-national analysis and by using Spain as a case study. Electoral disproportionality is unrelated to voter participation in early elections after democratization, but the relationship is increasingly visible as democracies grow older. The case study uncovers two mechanisms: small parties optimize their mobilization strategy only after the first democratic elections, and the difference in the turnout rates of small party supporters and large party supporters grows over time. Time is needed before the consequences of electoral systems are fully revealed. Importantly, the findings suggest that studies carried out just after an electoral system is created or reformed may provide downward biased estimates of their long-term consequences.

Introduction Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen PART I: THEORIES OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS * Politics in the Age of Hybrid Media: Power, Systems, and Media Logics Andrew Chadwick, James Dennis, and Amy P. Smith * Network Media Logic: Some Conceptual Considerations Ulrike Klinger and Jakob Svensson * Where There Is Social Media There Is Politics Karine Nahon * Is Habermas on Twitter? Social Media and the Public Sphere Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield * Third Space, Social Media and Everyday Political Talk Todd Graham, Scott Wright, and Dan Jackson * Tipping the Balance of Power: Social Media and the Transformation of Political Journalism Marcel Broersma and Todd Graham * Agenda-Setting Revisited: Social Media in Mainstream Journalism Eli Skogerbo, Axel Bruns, Andrew Quodling, and Thomas Ingebretsen *"Trust Me, I Am Authentic!": Authenticity Illusions in Social Media Politics Gunn Enli * How to Speak the Truth on Social Media: An Inquiry into Post-Dialectical Information Environments Mercedes Bunz PART II: POLITICAL MOVEMENTS * All Politics Is Local: Anonymous and the Steubenville/Maryville Rape Cases Christian Christensen * Social Media Accounts of the Spanish Indignados Camilo Cristancho and Eva Anduiza * Every Crisis Is a Digital Opportunity: The Aganaktismenoi Movement's Use of Social Media and the Emergence of Networked Solidarity in Greece Yannis Theocharis * Social Media Use during Political Crises: The Case of the Gezi Protests in Turkey Lemi Baruh and Hayley Watson * Structures of Feeling, Storytelling, and Social Media: The Case of #Egypt Zizi Papacharissi and Stacy Blasiola * The Importance of 'Social' in Social Media: The Lessons from Iran Gholam Khiabany * Digital Knives Are Still Knives: The Affordances of Social Media for a Repressed Opposition against an Entrenched Authoritarian Regime in Azerbaijan Katy E. Pearce and Farid Guliyev * Social Media and Social Movements: Weak Publics, the Online Space, Spatial Relations and Collective Action in Singapore Natalie Pang and Debbie Goh * Social Media and Civil Society Actions in India Rajesh Kumar * Cyberactivism in China: Empowerment, Control, and Beyond Rongbin Han * Voicing Discontent in South Korea: Origins and Channels of Online Civic Movements Maurice Vergeer and Se Jung Park * Nationalist and Anti-Fascist Movements in Social Media Christina Neumayer PART III: POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS * From Emerging to Established? A Comparison of Twitter Use during Swedish Election Campaigns in 2010 and 2014 Anders Olof Larsson and Hallvard Moe * Social Media in the UK Election Campaigns 2008-14: Experimentation, Innovation and Convergence Darren G. Lilleker, Nigel Jackson, and Karolina Koc-Michalska * Compulsory Voting, Encouraged Tweeting? Australian Elections and Social Media Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns * Not Just a Face(book) in the Crowd: Candidates' Use of Facebook during the Danish 2011 Parliamentary Election Campaign Morten Skovsgaard and Arjen Van Dalen * Social Media Incumbent Advantage: Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's Tweets in the 2012 US Presidential Election Campaign Gunn Enli and Anya Naper * The 2012 French Presidential Campaign: First Steps into the Political Twittersphere Francoise Papa and Jean-Marc Francony * The Emergence of Social Media Politics in South Korea: The Case of the 2012 Presidential Election Lars Willnat and Young Min * Interactions between Different Language Communities on Twitter during the 2012 Presidential Election in Taiwan Yu-Chung Cheng and Pai-lin Chen * Social Media Use in the German Election Campaign 2013 Christian Nuernbergk, Jennifer Wladarsch, Julia Neubarth, and Christoph Neuberger * Comparing Facebook and Twitter during the 2013 General Election in Italy Luca Rossi and Mario Orefice * Social Media and Election Campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from Cameroon Teke Ngomba * Social Media and Elections in Kenya Martin Nkosi Ndlela * Electoral Politics on Social Media: The Israeli Case Sharon Haleva-Amir and Karine Nahon * Social Media and the Scottish Independence Referendum 2014: Events and the Generation of Enthusiasm for Yes Mark Shephard and Stephen Quinlan * The Use of Twitter in the Danish EP Elections 2014 Jakob Linaa Jensen, Jacob Ormen, and Stine Lomborg * Twitter in Political Campaigns: The Brazilian 2014 Presidential Election Raquel Recuero, Gabriela Zago, and Marco T. Bastos

With this paper we study the impact of decentralization on turnout. We test the hypotheses that decentralization increases turnout in subnational elections, lowers participation in national elections, and reduces the gap between regional and national arenas. A comparative cross-national analysis does not show any significant effect of decentralization on turnout in national elections. But we take a closer look at two countries, Canada and Spain, where fiscal decentralization has taken place during the past decades. In both countries the empirical evidence suggests that decentralization has contributed to reducing the turnout gap between regional and national elections.

This article examines how traditional and Internet resources are related to three online modes of political participation (contact, donation, and petition) in Spain. Using a Heckman selection model, we find that traditional resources are more important in predicting access to the Internet than online participation. Among Internet users, traditional resources are irrelevant for predicting participation, while online resources are important to understanding who participates online. We also find that the effects of resources are not the same for all modes of participation and that some characteristics of the political system may shape the effects of resources on online participation.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the integration of mechanisms of direct citizen participation in the institutional structure of representative democracy, particularly at the local level. This essay examines the electoral impact of mechanisms of direct citizen participation. Although it is often considered that participatory schemes can be a means to achieve electoral success in the hands of politicians seeking re-election, quantitative analyses of 65 Spanish municipalities demonstrate that electoral success is far from being an immediate consequence of direct democratic practices (DDPs). The qualitative analysis of four cases shows that electoral consequences directly attributable to participatory devices depend on their design and on how they fit into the whole political process. Participatory processes that are too rigid and those, especially, that generate expectations that cannot be translated into real policies may end up having a negative effect. On the other hand, DDPs may account for network-building and improved information among citizens that, in turn, may have electoral consequences. DDPs are thus neither a blessing nor a cure per se in their electoral effects. Instead, as with representative democracy, their consequences and success will ultimately depend upon their procedural dimension.

Participating in elections is an essential component of democracy: citizens in democratic political systems are expected to be able to vote and to choose their representatives. Through their vote, either directly in presidential elections or indirectly in parliamentary elections, citizens also select among competing government alternatives. Turnout is thus a central topic in politics. Although turnout is the most widespread form of political participation, many people do not vote. Moreover, turnout varies substantially over time and across types of elections within a country as well as across countries. Who votes and under what conditions people are more likely to turn out are central questions in this literature. Explanations for turnout variation have focused both on individual characteristics (such as age, education, or political attitudes) and contextual features (such as the effect of compulsory voting, electoral systems, or party competition). Far less research has been devoted to the consequences of electoral turnout.

Some respondents of online surveys click responses at random. Screeners or instructional manipulation checks (IMC) have become customary for identifying this strong form of satisficing. This research first analyzes the factors that condition IMC failures using an online panel survey carried out in Spain (2011-2015). Our data show that the probability of passing a screener depends mainly on the screener's difficulty, the individuals' intrinsic motivations for answering the survey, and past failures. We then address the substantive consequences of omitting those who fail to pass IMCs. We find that this strategy introduces an additional source of bias in descriptive analyses. The article ends with a discussion of the implications that these findings have for the use of IMCs.

Introduction The diffusion and integration of digital media in social and political life are said to be creating new forms of political organization and new opportunities for political participation (Castells 2009). This chapter is a comparative study of how and why people get involved in different offline and online participatory environments in the United States and Spain. Researchers have differentiated forms of participation in digital milieus according to their architectures, which enable more or less participation (Jackson and Lilleker 2009; Chadwick 2009a; Chapter 2). Digital environments contain varied structures for communicative interaction. Although web 1.0 involves a fixed content transmitted from a sender to a receiver, web 2.0 is distinguished by the role the receiver plays in the co-production of content. That is, web 1.0 is characterized by closed architecture (Lessig 2006), whereas web 2.0 is widely regarded as having a participatory architecture (O’Reilly 2007). In addition, researchers have developed theories connecting participation with resources such as experience, time, money, and civic skills (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Modes of participation have been further distinguished by the attitudinal factors that motivate certain forms of participation but not others (Dalton 2008; Marsh, O’Toole, and Jones 2007). From a comparative perspective, research indicates the existence of differences in the categories of individuals and of attitudes motivating different forms of participation across systems (Dalton 2008). This chapter seeks to contribute to this line of research by examining the role the political context plays in shaping the forms of participation and the resources and attitudinal motivations behind them. We expect macro-level differences between the United States and Spain in political communication structures to have an impact on micro-level participatory practices in the two countries.

This book focuses on the impact of digital media use for political engagement across varied geographic and political contexts, using a diversity of methodological approaches and datasets. The book addresses an important gap in the contemporary literature on digital politics, identifying context dependent and transcendent political consequences of digital media use. While the majority of the empirical work in this field has been based on studies from the United States and United Kingdom, this volume seeks to place those results into comparative relief with other regions of the world. It moves debates in this field of study forward by identifying system-level attributes that shape digital political engagement across a wide variety of contexts. The volume brings together research and scholars from North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. The evidence analyzed across the fifteen cases considered in the book suggests that engagement with digital environments influences users' political orientations and that contextual features play a significant role in shaping digital politics.

Media availability and fragmentation and the resulting possibilities of content selection have risen dramatically with the expansion of new digital media. Previous research has found that this may increase knowledge gaps among citizens with different resources and motivations. This article analyses how Internet use affects political knowledge gaps due to education and to political interest in Spain. As expected, frequent Internet users are more knowledgeable about politics than non-users. Furthermore, Internet use increases knowledge more for the highly educated than for citizens with lower levels of education. Thus, the political knowledge gap related to education seems to be growing with the introduction of new media. However, the knowledge gap between citizens with high and low levels of political interest is smaller for frequent Internet users than for non-users. These findings provide a complex picture and partially contradict the pessimistic theory about the impact of increasing media choice on political knowledge.La disponibilidad y fragmentación de medios de comunicación y las posibilidades de elegir contenidos han aumentado en gran medida a raíz de la expansión de los medios digitales. Éstos pueden, según investigaciones anteriores, incrementar las diferencias en los niveles de conocimiento entre ciudadanos con distintas características. En este artículo se analiza cómo el uso de Internet afecta a las diferencias en el conocimiento político según el nivel educativo y el interés por la política en España. Los usuarios frecuentes de Internet saben más sobre política que los no usuarios, como era de esperar. Además, el uso de Internet incrementa el conocimiento político de manera más intensa para los usuarios con niveles educativos más elevados. Por tanto, parece que las diferencias en los niveles de conocimiento pueden estar creciendo con la expansión de los medios digitales. Sin embargo, las diferencias en el nivel de conocimiento de los más y menos interesados en política son menos pronunciadas entre los que usan Internet frecuentemente. Los resultados ofrecen una imagen compleja y matizan las teorías pesimistas sobre el impacto de la creciente posibilidad de elección de contenidos en los medios sobre el conocimiento político.

Attitudes are fundamental aspects of migrants’ relation to the political system where they live. Do they consider themselves able to understand and influence political decisions, or do they feel politics in their country of residence is not their business? Do migrants think that the political system is sensitive to their demands, or do they feel they can’t really have a say? Do they trust the political institutions of the country where they live? It would be hard to argue that these are not crucial elements of the degree of migrants’ political incorporation into their countries of residence.

The aim of this paper is to review the main questions dealt with by the literature on the effect of Internet on political participation. The paper distinguishes three relevant aspects: the estimation of the impact of Internet on the levels and types of political participation; the analysis of the causal mechanisms that lie behind the relationship between Internet use and participation; and the effect of the Internet on participatory inequalities. We conclude by identifying the aspects on which there is a relative consensus among scholars, the debates surrounding controversial conclusions obtained from different empirical analyses, and those questions where further research seems particularly necessary.

Este artículo analiza el grado de incorporación cívica de la población de origen inmigrante en las ciudades de Barcelona y Madrid. Los resultados que se presentan proceden de una encuesta realizada a sendas muestras de aproximadamente 1.000 y 1.200 individuos, respectivamente, a tres subgrupos de individuos de origen extranjero (ecuatoriano, marroquí y mixto de bolivianos, colombianos y peruanos) y a un grupo de control de individuos de origen autóctono. Con estos datos examinamos las diferencias que se pueden detectar en la incorporación cívica de la población de origen inmigrante con respecto a la autóctona, pero también las diferencias existentes en la capacidad de incorporación en ambos contextos urbanos. Especial consideración merecen las notables variaciones que existen en las pautas de incorporación del grupo de origen marroquí en las dos ciudades.

This article addresses two controversial questions related to the effect of electoral campaigns. Malaise theories suggest that, although campaigns are intended to get out votes, they can in some cases have a demobilizing effect. Minimal effects theories suggest that campaigns have little conversion effects and that they mainly reinforce prior predispositions of voters. Looking at the Spanish general election of 2000 this article examines whether the campaign had a demobilizing effect and whether it also had an impact on the vote choice itself. Panel data make it possible to estimate the effect of exposure to campaign messages, the evaluation of the campaign carried out by parties and candidates, and the changes in attitudes that may have occurred during the campaign. The results show that the campaign did not demobilize voters but did have a significant effect on voters' support of the party in government.

This article examines the interaction between individual characteristics and insti- tutional incentives in non-voting, with a special focus on the interaction between these two types of explanatory variables. The analysis of survey and contextual data for parliamentary elections in 15 Western European countries shows that the effect of individual resources and motivations on abstention is not constant across different countries. Conversely, the effect of institutional incentives (compulsory voting, voting facilities, electoral thresholds of representation and preference expression) on non-voting depends on the elector's level of resources and motivations. One of the four institutional incentives considered has even opposite effects for citizens with different individual characteristics. The analysis also shows that when analysing interactions it is fundamental to distinguish between magnitudes and consequences of the effects of explanatory variables. This has important implications for the interpretation of the results of logistic regression analysis.

[ES] El IV Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba, celebrado en octubre de 1991, estuvo marcado por una voluntad continuista. Aunque el país atraviesa una de sus peores crisis, las reformas fueron pocas, dirigidas principalmente a aumentar la representatividad del partido y el grado de democracia en su funcionamiento interno. En el aspecto económico el único cambio fue el permitir a ciertas categorías profesionales el trabajo por cuenta propia., [EN] The IV congress of the Cuban Communist Party, held in October 1991 showed a will of continuity. Although the country must cope with the worst crisis ever suffered reforms are not as many as expected. The congress aproved some modest changes intended to make the party more democratic in its inner working and more representative, such as the direct election of the National Assembly members. The sole concession made to free markets was to allow small tradesmen to work on their own account.

This chapter reviews some key aspects of the analysis of political participation using surveys. The first section focuses on the challenges related to conceptualization and measurement. The standardization pursued by survey methods is challenged by the changing reality of political participation, which is permanently redefining its conceptual boundaries and including new repertoires. Measurement needs to balance different objectives: tapping on detailed and updated repertoires of action, reducing potential sources of bias such as social desirability or recall error, and maximizing the possibilities for comparison both across space and along time. A second section presents alternative research designs including cross-sectional surveys, panel surveys, surveys to specific groups (including minorities and protesters) and recent innovative research designs. Their potential contributions and limitations in terms of description, generalization, and the identification of causal relations are examined. A final section discusses some of the pending matters for future research.