Five Danish referendums on the European Community and European Union: A critical assessment of the Franklin thesis

Abstract. Denmark had five referendums in the period from 1972 to 1998 dealing with Danish membership in the European Community, the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty, the Edinburgh Agreement and the Amsterdam Treaty. Did the Danes really address these issues and involve themselves actively in the policy–making process on a vital issue or did they merely vote for or against the current government? The latter option represents the 'second order' elections argument advanced by Mark Franklin and others (see Franklin's article in this issue). If correct in this instance, it may have important and negative consequences for the potential of referendums to involve citizens more directly in the way they are governed. In this article, the Franklin thesis is assessed on the basis of data on voting behaviour in five Danish referendums on Europe and the democratic implications of these findings are discussed.     

Violent Youth Group Involvement, Self-reported Offending and Victimisation: An Empirical Assessment of an Integrated Informal Control/Lifestyle Model

The present study assesses the relationship between family and educational disadvantage on self-reported offending, victimisation and violent youth group involvement in a Belgian medium-sized city. Many studies have focused on the relationship between family disadvantage (one-parent families, immigrant background) and educational disadvantage (vocational tracking, school failure) and violent youth group involvement, offending/victimisation in surveys. The present study primarily assesses to what extent social bonds (parental monitoring and the school social bond), deviant beliefs, low self-control and lifestyle risk are stable mediators of the relationship between family and educational disadvantage and self-reported offending, victimisation and troublesome youth group involvement among young adolescents. The results indicate that the lifestyle-exposure model, which was initially used to explain individual differences in victimisation is much better capable of explaining differences in selfreported offending and violent youth group involvement than victimisation. The implications for further studies are discussed.     

It's not the time they spend, it's what they do: The interaction between delinquent friends and unstructured routine activity on delinquency : Findings from two countries

This study examines whether having delinquent friends interacts with other peer-related variables in the explanation of adolescent offending. We hypothesise that the relationship between delinquent friends and offending might be conditioned by the effect of (1) how much time they spend with their friends, (2) how much time they spend in unstructured routine activities and (3) their emotional relationship with their friends. To test these three hypotheses we use data from two independent samples of young adolescents in Halmstad, Sweden (N = 1,003) and in Cologne and Freiburg, Germany (N = 955). The results found strong support that the effect of delinquent friends on adolescent offending is conditional on the level of time they spend in unstructured routine activities. This indicates that delinquent friends have a stronger effect on offending for adolescents who often spend their free time in unstructured routine activities.     

Representation and voter participation

Abstract This paper presents results from a study of turnout in the 1994 European Parliament elections which inserted several new questions into the post–election Eurobarometer, including some open–ended questions. It distinguishes between circumstantial and voluntary abstention and shows how each type varies depending on the institutional arrangements for the election. Using both the subjective reasons given for abstention and a range of more objective measures of attitudes, it makes the case that conventional views as to the impact of Sunday–voting and the proportionality of the electoral system and as to the non–impact of attitudes to the European Union need to be modified. It concludes by identifying some practical institutional and political measures that could encourage higher levels of participation.