Examining the interplay between distrust, trust and corruption, this book maps out the social mechanisms that make actors and organizations in the public sphere perform their activities in a civilized manner.

This book discusses the extent to which the theoretical relevance and analytical rigor of the concept of the public sphere is affected by current processes of transnationalization. The contributions address fundamental questions concerning the viability of a socially and politically effective public sphere in a post-Westphalian world.

Are young people today politically 'apathetic'? Or are they democratically 'mature' citizens? This book examines several types of involvement to reveal changes in young people's political participation in Europe in recent decades. It uses various concepts of 'age' to compare participation across countries and over time.

This volume introduces and compares different concepts of culture in social movement research. It assesses their advantages and shortcomings, drawing links to anthropology, discourse analysis, sociology of emotions, narration, spatial theory, and others. Each contribution's approach is illustrated with recent cases of mobilization.

This book explores the structural tensions and conflicts that arise with the abolition of border controls between the EU's member states and how this conflict ridden relationship affects and is affected by the institutional shape of the EU's external borders.

This book is about both the symbolic and the real struggles for the control of the EU's agenda on participatory democracy in the last fifteen years. The book analyzes how civil society organizations contributed to an agenda which has implications for the regulation of interest groups to the institutions and for the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

The European Union clearly matters for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). EU officials and European political entrepreneurs has been crucial in the promotion of funding and access opportunities, but they have been proven to have little capacity to use CSOs for their own purposes.

This book assesses how much influence social movements have on EU policy and the means through which influence is secured. Using wide-ranging case studies of campaigns from GMOs to water rights and Internet freedom, it elucidates the important differences between technical and political campaigns.

In order to better understand processes of European integration, this book offers a new perspective that compares past experiences of change to current transitional moments at the European level. It addresses key questions about European society, EU integration and social change to reveal the social construction of emergent polities and societies.

This collection presents a political sociology of crisis in Europe. Focusing on state and society transformations in the context of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath in Europe, it observes a return of redistributive conflicts that correlates with a 'new politics of identity', nationalism, regionalism and expressions of Euroscepticism.