The Effects of Media and their Logic on Legitimacy Sources within Local Governance Networks: A Three-Case Comparative Study

__Abstract__ Although theoretical and empirical work on the democratic legitimacy of governance networks is growing, little attention has been paid to the impact of mediatisation on democracies. Media have their own logic of news-making led by the media’s rules, aims, production routines and constraints, which affect political decision-making processes. In this article, we specifically study how media and their logic affect three democratic legitimacy sources of political decision-making within governance networks: voice, due deliberation and accountability. We conducted a comparative case study of three local governance networks using a mixed method design, combining extensive qualitative case studies, interviews and a quantitative content analysis of media reports. In all three cases, media logic increased voice possibilities for citizen groups. Furthermore, it broadened the deliberation process, although this did not improve the quality of this process per se, because the media focus on drama and negativity. Finally, media logic often pushed political authorities into a reactive communication style as they had to fight against negative images in the media. Proactive communication about projects, such as public relation (PR) strategies and branding, is difficult in such a media landscape

At the crossroads: Future directions in trust research

This forum paper is intended to stimulate a debate on a fundamental conceptual issue in trust research. It argues that the dominant stream of literature focuses too much on the micro level of trust building processes and hence promotes a reductionist understanding of the phenomenon. In future trust research, it is suggested to place considerably more emphasis on the ‘constitutive’ embeddedness of actors’ behaviour in the institutional environment. The latter is shown to be conducive to overcoming the limitations of current mainstream trust research and to developing new insights into the role and functioning of trust in modern business systems

Mixing process-generated data in market sociology

Market sociology, Process-produced data, Process-generated data, Mixed methods research, Quantitative and qualitative data, Social bookkeeping data,