Central to the study is the relevance of media actors as actors in civil society for the European integration process. This relevance is empirically assessed, making use of a selection of print media from two founding members of the European Union, Germany and the Netherlands, analysing the path-dependency of journalistic coverage and reporting along two questions: Is the focus on and evaluation of the 'European Project' and its different aspects in Germany and the Netherlands alike, or does it differ? How do traditional political and societal perspectives affect opinion formation in the media? The country comparison draws on the neo-institutional school of thought. The large corpus of newspaper content (articles and commentary) has been assessed quantitatively as well as qualitatively searching for major issues, motives, and discourses in temporal perspective. The last major treaties of the European integration process, the so called Constitutional Treaty and Reform Treaty, serve as temporal starting and endpoint for analysis. Anne-Dörte Balks, M.A./M.Sc., studied European Studies (focus: political science) at the University of Osnabrück, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and the University of Twente (Enschede, NL). Her research interest is on the discourse on European integration in European societies and media. She currently works as Personal Assistant to the Vice President International at Freie Universität Berlin.

This book discusses the public opinion process with a focus on the role that the news media play in shaping public opinion. Although heavily influenced by the agenda-setting perspective -- the view that the news media define the important issues of the day and determine how these issues are presented -- the authors neither support nor refute this claim. They present instead a variety of contemporary scholarship integrated into a coherent picture of public opinion for a general audience.

In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of "the world outside and the pictures in our heads", a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. Lippmann's conclusions are as meaningful in a world of television and computers as in the earlier period when newspapers were dominant. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Public opinion matters. It registers itself on the public consciousness, translates into politics and policy, and impels politicians to run for office and, once elected, to serve in particular ways.This is a book about opinion?not opinions. James Stimson takes the incremental, vacillating, time-trapped data points of public opinion surveys and transforms them into a conceptualization of public mood swings that can be measured and used to predict change, not just to describe it. To do so, he reaches far back in U.S. survey research and compiles the data in such a way as to allow the minutiae of attitudes toward abortion, gun control, and housing to dissolve into a portrait of national mood and change.Using sophisticated techniques of coding, statistics, and data equalization, the author has amassed an unrivaled database from which to extrapolate his findings. The results go a long way toward calibrating the folklore of political eras, and the cyclical patterns that emerge show not only the regulatory impulse of the 1960s and 1970s and the swing away from it in the 1980s; the cycles also show that we are in the midst of another major mood swing right now?what the author calls the ?unnoticed liberalism? of current American politics.Concise, suggestive, and eminently readable, Public Opinion in America is ideal for courses on public opinion, public policy, and methods, as well as for introductory courses in American government. Examples and illustrations abound, and appendixes document the measurement of policy mood from survey research marginals. This revised second edition includes updated data on public opinion and voters through the 1996 presidential election.

This history of early American political thought examines the emergence, evolution, and manipulation of public opinion. In the early American republic, the concept of public opinion was a recent—and ambiguous—invention. While appearing to promise a new style of democratic politics, the concept was also invoked to limit self-rule, cement traditional prejudices, stall deliberation, and marginalize dissent. As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contestable idea, they expanded and contracted the horizons of political possibility and renegotiated the terms of political legitimacy. Tracing the concept from its late eighteenth-century origins to the Gilded Age, Mark G. Schmeller’s Invisible Sovereign argues that public opinion is a central catalyst in the history of American political thought. Schmeller treats it as a contagious idea that infected a broad range of discourses and practices in powerful, occasionally ironic, and increasingly contentious ways. Ranging across a wide variety of historical fields, Invisible Sovereign traces a shift over time from early “political-constitutional” concepts, which wrapped pubic opinion in the language of constitutionalism, to more modern, “social-psychological” concepts, which defined public opinion as a product of social action and mass communication.