The Beauty and the Beast. A Tale of Democratic Crises and Globalization

There are two competing hypotheses concerning the connection between democracy and globalization. The critics hold globalization responsible for an ongoing crisis of democracy. The enthusiasts highlight the positive contributions of financial openness and international political cooperation on the development of democracy. In this contribution the author investigates the interrelation between globalization and the quality of established democracies. He introduces the Democracy Barometer, a new instrument that measures the quality of democracy in 30 established democratic regimes between 1995 and 2005 and that explicitly does not measure sustainable government because it aims at serving as dependent as well as independent variable to explain different economic, societal and natural environment, i.e. sustainable development. Based on this instrument, the author first shows that one cannot speak of an ongoing crisis of (established) democracies. Second, he also conducts several multilevel analyses to model the different developments of the quality of democracy in the different countries. The author then shows that economy, i.e. economic globalization indeed has a positive impact on the quality of democracy. However, this impact is stronger in stable, i.e. older than in younger established democracies. Further investigations show that a high quality of democracy also goes hand in hand with societal and environmental performance.

How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public: Policy Feedback, Participation, Voting and Attitudes

This crucial volume significantly advances the study of policy feedbacks. With contributions from many subfields and methodological approaches, it offers both sophisticated theorizing and new empirical examples that show how policies make politics in a variety of ways. Innovative research designs provide more convincing inference than ever. And the normative questions engaged about welfare performance, evaluation, participation, and accountability could not be more important or timely in this era of austerity and discord over the future of welfare states.’

The Reform of the EC Audiovisual Media Regulation : Television Without Cultural Diversity

In the profoundly changing and dynamic world of contemporary audiovisual media, what has remained surprisingly unaffected is regulation. In the European Union, the new Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS), proposed by the European Commission on December 13, 2005, should allegedly rectify this situation. Amending the existing Television without Frontiers Directive, it should offer a fresh approach and meet the challenge of appropriately regulating media in a complex environment. It is meant to achieve a balance between the free circulation of TV broadcast and new audiovisual media and the preservation of values of cultural identity and diversity, while respecting the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality inherent to the Community. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the changes envisaged to the EC audiovisual media regime might influence cultural diversity in Europe. It addresses subsequently the question of whether the new AVMS properly safeguards the balance between competition and the public interest in this regard, or whether cultural diversity remains a mere political banner.