With the primaries in full swing and the upcoming elections, one cannot but ponder what role new technologies such as the Internet are playing in facilitating citizens’ engagement in the political process. Is the Internet actually making a difference?
The Internet has certainly lowered the barriers of participation – if one wants to get involved, there [...]

Our new paper: “Reconfiguring Friendships: Social Relationships and the Internet”, co-authored with Professor Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, is now available in the new special issue of Information, Communication and Society (Vol. 10, Issue 5) on e-Relationships.
In this paper we investigate whether and how social relationships are [...]

Robert Putnam’s latest work on ethnic diversity and social capital, which shows a negative correlation between the two, has been published: Putnam, R.D. (2007) “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The 2006 Joahn Skytte Prize Lecture”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2):137-174. The study presents results based on the data from the 2000 [...]