This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the PIDOP project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in, paying attention to, or having knowledge, beliefs, opinions, attitudes or feelings about either political or...

The often-posed claim that Europe is a pessimistic continent is not unjustified. In 2012, 53 percent of European Union (EU) citizens were pessimistic about their country. Surprisingly, however, societal pessimism has received very little scientific attention. In this article, we examine to what extent political and economic factors drive societal pessimism. In terms of political factors, we exp...

The present study was an attempt to identify a model of the political and socio-economic factors influencing Iranian EFL learners’ motivation to learn English. To achieve this, 20 EFL learners were interviewed about their motivation of learning English and based on these interviews, a questionnaire was designed and piloted among 221 EFL learners. Exploratory factor analysis w...

distribution and allocation of resources is affected by factors such as values, norms, social stratifications, ideology, information, coercion, political challenges, and even external factors. this finding means that there is always a fundamental tendency to redirect resources toward political goals instead of public interests and development. because the resource structure is strongly influenc...

Political culture represents a society`s widely held, traditional values and its fundamental practices; foreign policy decision makers tend to make policies that are compatible with their society`s political culture because they share, if not all, many of those values. Among the various factors influencing Iran`s foreign policy,  the role of political culture seems to be rather underestimated. ...

Political violence, armed conflicts and human rights violations are produced by a variety of political, economic and socio-cultural factors. Conflicts can be analyzed with an interdisciplinary approach to obtain a global understanding of the relative contribution of risk and protective factors. A public health framework was designed to address these risk factors and protective factors. The fram...

What factors have promoted and retarded the spread of the internet globally? The internet is one example of the diffusion of technology. Much as other technologies, the internet has diffused unevenly across countries, raising concerns over a “digital divide.” My main proposition is that its spread has been driven by neither technological nor economic factors alone. Rather political factors exer...

This paper extends the model of Fielding (1999), which is designed to explain changes in investment in South Africa during the Apartheid period, by allowing a role for indicators of political instability and political and civil rights, as measured by Fedderke et al. (1999). The conclusions based on estimation of the original model are robust to the inclusion of the political factors, but these ...