Identification and ethnic diversity underlie support for multicultural rights : a multilevel analysis in Bulgaria

Bulgaria is historically a multicultural society, composed of the Bulgarian (ethnic) majority and a number of ethnic minorities among which Bulgarian Turks and Roma are the largest. Both minority communities are stigmatized in contemporary Bulgaria, though to different degrees and for different reasons. Ethnic minorities' rights to preserve their culture, customs, and language are a topic of contentious debate. The purpose of this study was to examine individual- and context-level antecedents of the ethnic Bulgarian majority's support for multicultural rights of ethnic minorities. Multilevel regression analyses were conducted with International Social Survey Programme ISSP 2003 data (N = 920 in 28 Bulgarian districts). At the individual-level, an ethnic conception of the nation and anti-Roma symbolic prejudice were negatively related to support for multicultural rights, whereas national identification was positively related to the support of these rights. Over and above individual-level effects, and in line with recent extensions of intergroup contact theory, thepercentage ofBulgarianTurks withindistricts was positively related to support for multicultural rights. Importantly, support for multicultural rights was particularly high in districts characterized by ethnic diversity, that is, in districts with high proportions of both Bulgarian Turks and Roma. The beneficial effects of ethnic diversity and theoretical implications of findings are discussed

E-Democracy and the European Public Sphere

The chapter starts with an outline of outstanding recent contributions to the discussion of the EU democratic deficit and the so-called “no demos” problem and the debate about European citizenship and European identity—mainly in the light of insights from the EU crisis. This is followed by reflections on the recent discussion on the state of the mass media-based European public sphere. Finally, the author discusses the state of research on the Internet’s capacity to support the emergence of a (renewed) public sphere, with a focus on options for political actors to use the Internet for communication and campaigning, on the related establishment of segmented issue-related publics as well as on social media and its two-faced character as an enabler as well as a distorting factor of the public sphere. The author is sceptic about the capacities of Internet-based political communication to develop into a supranational (European) public sphere. It rather establishes a network of a multitude of discursive processes aimed at opinion formation at various levels and on various issues. The potential of online communication to increase the responsiveness of political institutions so far is set into practice insufficiently. Online media are increasingly used in a vertical and scarcely in a horizontal or interactive manner of communication