Prevention,Adaptation, and Threat Denial: Flooding Experiences in the Netherlands

Delta areas such as the Netherlands are more and more at risk of future flooding due to global climate change. Motivating residents living in flood-prone areas to effectively cope with local floods may lead to minimization of material losses and loss of life. The aim of this research was to investigate whether the extent to which residents had been exposed to flooding in the past was a key factor in motivating residents to effectively cope with future flooding. We also focused on the psychological variables that mediated this relationship. We conducted a survey (N = 516) among flood victims and nonvictims. We assessed subjective experiences due to past flooding, affective and cognitive appraisals, and coping responses. Results show that victims reported stronger emotions (negative and positive), and the receipt of more social support due to past flooding than did nonvictims. Moreover, victims worry more about future flooding, perceive themselves as more vulnerable to future flooding, perceive the consequences of future flooding as more severe, and have stronger intentions to take adaptive actions in the future than nonvictims. Structural equation modeling reveals that the latter effect was fully mediated by specific experiences and appraisals. Insights into factors and processes that have the potential to motivate residents to effectively cope with future floods may prove helpful in developing interventions to inform residents how to act effectively in case of an imminent flood.     

The man in the black hat

A century after the American Frontier was closed, the cowboy remains an iconic figure. A sturdy individualism, a steely disregard for convention and the bravery to do what’s gotta be done: these are powerful tropes that seemingly define a particular type of heroism. One that seems ageless despite the disappearance of the border environment in which the fictive cowboy operated.

Our aim in this paper is to explore the mythology of the cowboy as depicted in western films and fiction, demonstrating how it draws upon and develops particular kinds of individualism, sociality and morality that were first explicitly explored in the late eighteenth century. And, as theoretically‐laden icon, we examine how the cowboy continues to shape writing and thinking about individuals and organizations, specifically focussing on the works of Ayn Rand and notions of entrepreneurship.     

Capabilities and Choices: Do They Make Sen’se for Understanding Objective and Subjective Well-Being? An Empirical Test of Sen’s Capability Framework on German and British Panel Data

In Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on well-being. There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing his capability model especially in a dynamic perspective. The contribution of the paper is first to test Sen’s theoretical CA approach empirically using 25 years of German and 18 years of British data. Second, to examine to what extent the capability approach can explain long-term changes in well-being and third to view the impact on subjective as well as objective well-being in two clearly distinct welfare states. Three measures of well-being are constructed: life satisfaction for subjective well-being and relative income and employment security for objective well-being. We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The findings strongly support Sen’s capabilities framework and provide evidence on the way capabilities, choices and constraints matter for objective and subjective well-being. Capabilities pertaining to human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and choices to family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social behaviour show to strongly affect long-term changes in subjective and objective well-being though in a different way largely depending on the type of well-being measure used.     

The informed society: an analysis of the public's information-seeking behavior regarding coastal flood risks

Recent flood risk management puts an increasing emphasis on the public's risk perception and its preferences. It is now widely recognized that a better knowledge of the public's awareness and concern about risks is of vital importance to outline effective risk communication strategies. Models such as Risk Information Seeking and Processing address this evolution by considering the public's needs and its information-seeking behavior with regard to risk information. This study builds upon earlier information-seeking models and focuses on the empirical relationships between information-seeking behavior and the constructs of risk perception, perceived hazard knowledge, response efficacy, and information need in the context of coastal flood risks. Specific focus is given to the mediating role of information need in the model and to the differences in information-seeking behavior between permanent and temporary residents. By means of a structured on-line questionnaire, a cross-sectional survey was carried out in the city of Ostend, one of the most vulnerable places to coastal flooding on the Belgian coast. Three hundred thirteen respondents participated in the survey. Path analysis reveals that information need does not act as a mediator in contrast to risk perception and perceived knowledge. In addition, it is shown that risk perception and perceived hazard knowledge are higher for permanent than temporary residents, leading to increased information-seeking behavior among the former group. Implications for risk communication are discussed.     

Towards a European public sphere?

In this paper we address the alleged communication or public sphere deficit of the EU. We develop a systematic approach to the Europeanization of public spheres, which distinguishes three forms of Europeanized political communication: supranational, vertical and horizontal. We propose that the spatial reach and boundaries of public communication can be determined by investigating communicative flows and assessing the relative density of public communication within and between different geopolitical spaces. We apply this model to data on political claim making in seven issue fields in German print media in the year 2000. We find that the degree and forms of Europeanization of political communication vary considerably among policy fields. These differences are strongly linked to the extent and type (supranational or intergovernmental) of competencies of the EU in these fields. Contrary to the hypothesis of a public sphere deficit, the German mass media seem to quite accurately reflect the Europeanization of policy making, at least in those policy fields where a clear‐cut transfer of competencies to the supranational EU level has taken place.     

Movements and media: Selection processes and evolutionary dynamics in the public sphere

This article argues that the decisive part of the interaction between social movements and political authorities is no longer the direct, physical confrontation between them in concrete locations, but the indirect, mediated encounters among contenders in the arena of the mass media public sphere. Authorities react to social movement activities if and as they are depicted in the mass media, and conversely movement activists become aware of political opportunities and constraints through the reactions (or non-reactions) that their actions provoke in the public sphere. The dynamics of this mediated interaction among political contenders can be analyzed as an evolutionary process. Of the great variety of attempts to mobilize public attention, only a few can be accommodated in the bounded media space. Three selection mechanisms–labelled here as “discursive opportunities”– can be identified that affect the diffusion chances of contentious messages: visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc.–react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive). The argument is empirically illustrated by showing how the strategic repertoire of the German radical right evolved over the course of the 1990s as a result of the differential reactions that various strategies encountered in the mass media arena.     

The Role of European Welfare States in Explaining Resources Deprivation

In a previous paper in this journal (Headey etal., 2000) a comparison was made between threeso-called `best cases' of welfare regime types,the `Liberal' US, `the `Corporatist' Germanyand the `Social-Democratic' Netherlands. Themain conclusion was that the Social-Democraticwelfare state performed best on nearly allsocial and economic indicators that wereapplied. That paper was based on the ten-yeardatasets drawn from the national socio-economicpanel studies. For this paper we use the uniquecomparative panel dataset of the EuropeanCommunity Household Panel. At the time ofresearch, only three waves of data covering the1994–96 period were available. Instead of threecountries representing three different welfarestate types as in the earlier paper we covertwelve countries allowing us to distinguish afourth Southern or Mediterranean welfare regimetype and to compare the performance of the fourregimes. Compared to the Headey's et al. paperwe focus on the comparative analysis of thelevel of deprivation and pay less attention toincome poverty and inequality. Because weconsider deprivation to be part of the conceptof social exclusion (see also Atkinson et al.,2002) our results also provide evidence on howwelfare regimes across the EU cope with socialexclusion. We conclude that theSocial-Democratic welfare state does a good jobof preventing income poverty but performs lesswell in equalising levels of deprivation. Ourresults also show that the immature Southernwelfare states perform worse with respect topreventing deprivation. Trying to explainlevels of deprivation by estimating Tobit panelregressions it turned out that the impact ofregime type remains significant though limited.Common, `structural' disparities between thecountries and regimes in terms of economicwelfare, the demographic structure, and theemployment situation explain most of thevariance across countries.     

Characterizations of the β- and the Degree Network Power Measure

A symmetric network consists of a set of positions and a set of bilateral links between these positions. For every symmetric network we define a cooperative transferable utility game that measures the “power” of each coalition of positions in the network. Applying the Shapley value to this game yields a network power measure, the β-measure, which reflects the power of the individual positions in the network. Applying this power distribution method iteratively yields a limit distribution, which turns out to be proportional to the well-known degree measure. We compare the β-measure and degree measure by providing characterizations, which differ only in the normalization that is used.      

Statistical and Perceived Diversity and Their Impacts on Neighborhood Social Cohesion in Germany,France and the Netherlands

The question whether ethnic diversity is associated with declining social cohesion has produced much controversy. We maintain that more attention must be paid to cognitive mechanisms to move the debate ahead. Using survey data from 938 localities in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, we explore a crucial individual-level mechanism: perceptions of diversity. We not only consider perceptions of the amount, but also of the qualitative nature of diversity. By asking about various qualitative aspects of diversity, we test the cognitive salience of three explanations that have been proposed in the literature for negative diversity effects: out-group biases, asymmetric preferences and coordination problems. We show that all three mechanisms matter. Perceptions both mediate statistical diversity effects, and have important explanatory power of their own. Moreover, we are able to address the question to what extend the relationship of perceived diversity and neighborhood social cohesion varies across policy contexts. Based on assumptions in the literature about positive impacts of inclusive and culturally pluralist immigrant integration policy approaches, we hypothesize that ethno-cultural diversity is less negatively related to neighborhood social cohesion in more inclusive policy contexts. Our results provide partial support for this hypothesis as perceived diversity has a significantly stronger negative impact on neighborhood cohesion in Germany.