First and foremost I am greatly indebted to my three promotors, from whom I learned a lot;
Nan Dirk de Graaf, Ariana Need and Wout Ultee. Nan Dirk, thank you for your confidence …

Background Various accounts of the so-called 'gender gap'have been advanced. Renfrow
(Citation 1994), for example, refers to the 'convergence'and 'divergence'hypotheses:' …

Over the last few decades there has been considerable research on the decline of political
trust in the industrialised democracies (Abramson, 1983; Nye, Zelikow and King, 1997; Pharr …

Assuming that parties compete along a single left-right axis, most researchers assessing the
impact of party positions on voting behaviour have typically tested whether the distance or …

Ulrich Beck's argument about risk society emphasises, among other things, the
pervasiveness of risk. As a feature of the human condition in the contemporary, globalised …

This thesis examines the feasibility of lay citizen participation in the process of constitutional
reform in Australia. While there have been increasing calls in recent decades for members of …