In this working paper, we treat legitimacy and legitimation as interactive, discursive and relational concepts: Legitimacy is socially constructed in the public spheres of (democratic) political regimes, that is, in discursive exchanges of political elites and citizens about the acceptability of...

This working paper first outlines the contours of a discourse analytical approach to the study of legitimation processes and then presents findings from a quantitative analysis of legitimacy-related communication in selected print media of the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States...

The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...

Welche gesellschaftlichen Gruppen sind überhaupt in der Lage kollektiv zu handeln? Welche Mechanismen schließen andere Gruppen von der politischen Partizipation aus? Können die 'alten' Akteure heute noch Mitglieder und UnterstützerInnen mobilisieren? Wie verändern sich die Perspektiven...

Politicisation of intellectual property, driven by the digitisation of media and the rapid expansion of the internet, has made intellectual property rights relevant not only for a limited number of corporate actors, but increasingly for individual citizens in their everyday practices. The...

Collecting societies currently face major challenges stemming from: the reconfiguration of existing and emergence of new powerful players in the field of music distribution; the necessity of cross-territorial licensing options, and; the fragmentation of copyrights. This article presents an...