Sally Stares

Developing European indicators of trust in justice

A social indicators approach to trust in justice recognizes that the police and criminal courts need public support and institutional legitimacy if they are to operate effectively and fairly. In order to generate public cooperation and compliance, these institutions must demonstrate to citizens that they are trustworthy and that they possess the authority to govern. In this paper we first outline the conceptual roadmap for a current comparative analysis of trust in justice. We then describe the methodological development process of a 45-item module in Round 5 of the European Social Survey, which fields the core survey indicators. After presenting the findings from a quantitative pilot of the indicators, we consider the policy implications of a procedural justice model of criminal justice.

The 2010 Eurobarometer on the life sciences

Since 1991, the triennial Eurobarometer survey has assessed public attitudes about biotech and the life sciences in Europe. The latest 2010 Eurobarometer survey on the Life Sciences and Biotechnology (http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/europeans-biotechnology-in-2010_en.pdf), based on representative samples from 32 European countries, hints at a new era in the relations between science and society. We see less criticism of technology based on distrust in government and industry; more enthusiasm for novel technologies; and a more sophisticated appraisal of what technologies offer in terms of benefits, safety and sustainability. Europeans want regulation in the public interest and want a voice in such regulation when social values are at stake; we highlight an emerging European landscape of social value differences that shape peoples views of technologies.

Europeans and Biotechnology in 2010: Winds of change?

George Gaskell and colleagues designed, analysed and interpreted the Eurobarometer 73.1 on the Life Sciences and Biotechnology as part of the research project Sensitive Technologies and European Public Ethics (STEPE), funded by the Science in Society Programme of the EC’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7).

Participation and competence as joint components in a cross-national analysis of scientific citizenship

Recent years have witnessed a ‘democratic turn’ towards active citizen participation in science and technology. The emerging participatory approach has been framed as a critique of a reductionist, outdated ‘deficit model’ of citizen competence, literacy or understanding. Participatory modes of citizen involvement with science are presented as competing rather than complementary in offering a strategy for making science and technology accountable and open to society. We use latent class models to develop cross-national measures of competence and participation, and explore the relation between the two. We argue that the question of how to analyze and assess the role of citizens in knowledge societies should not be an either/or — participation or competence — but a matter of understanding the balance and interconnected-ness of both. We suggest that the idea of a ‘scientific citizenship’ could be a useful integrative notion to bridge the divide between concerns about public participation and public competence.

Performed and preferred participation in science and technology across Europe: Exploring an alternative idea of “democratic deficit”:

Republican ideals of active scientific citizenship and extensive use of deliberative, democratic decision making have come to dominate the public participation agenda, and academic analyses have focused on the deficit of public involvement vis-à-vis these normative ideals. In this paper we use latent class models to explore what Eurobarometer survey data can tell us about the ways in which people participate in tacit or in policy-active ways with developments in science and technology, but instead of focusing on the distance between observed participation and the dominant, normative ideal of participation, we examine the distance between what people do, and what they themselves think is appropriate in terms of involvement. The typology of citizens emerging from the analyses entails an entirely different diagnosis of democratic deficit, one that stresses imbalance between performed and preferred participation.

Religion and the public ethics of stem-cell research: Attitudes in Europe, Canada and the United States

We examine international public opinion towards stem-cell research during the period when the issue was at its most contentious. We draw upon representative sample surveys in Europe and North America, fielded in 2005 and find that the majority of people in Europe, Canada and the United States supported stem-cell research, providing it was tightly regulated, but that there were key differences between the geographical regions in the relative importance of different types of ethical position. In the U.S., moral acceptability was more influential as a driver of support for stem-cell research; in Europe the perceived benefit to society carried more weight; and in Canada the two were almost equally important. We also find that public opinion on stem-cell research was more strongly associated with religious convictions in the U.S. than in Canada and Europe, although many strongly religious citizens in all regions approved of stem-cell research. We conclude that if anything public opinion or ‘public ethics’ are likely to play an increasingly important role in framing policy and regulatory regimes for sensitive technologies in the future.

How Europe's ethical divide looms over biotech law and patents.

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Using Latent Class Models to Explore Cross-national Typologies of Public Engagement with Science and Technology in Europe

Public engagement with science and technology is a central theme in the field of Public Understanding of Science (PUS), particularly in Europe. Alongside public consultation exercises and similar activities aimed at generating engagement, there is a need for good survey indicators of the general climate for engagement with science and technology among the public. With internationally focused PUS studies increasing in prominence, such survey indicators should ideally characterise engagement in approximately the same way across a range of countries, to facilitate sensible cross-national analyses involving this construct. This article presents cross-national analyses of two sets of questions posed in the Eurobarometer survey on public perceptions of biotechnology, conducted in 2002 in fifteen European countries. The items analysed capture a range of elements of the concept of engagement, both with science and technology, in general, and with biotechnology, in particular. Latent class models are used to explore typologies of types of engagement: substantively, to understand their content, and methodologically, to identify items which do not work well in these classifications. The analyses are also used to assess the statistical cross-national comparability of such typologies, and consequently to describe variations in levels of engagement across countries.

Successful Agricultural Innovation in Emerging Economies: Have GM crops and food a future in Europe?

Intensive mono-functional agriculture, typical across many European Member States, is designed to increase the efficiency and productivity of the agricultural sector. This is accompanied by frequent spraying of crops with chemicals for protection against pests and diseases. While the health and environmental impacts of pesticides and their residues are debated among scientific experts, in the minds of European citizens they constitute the most significant food risk. The Eurobarometer public opinion survey on Food-Related Risks commissioned by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in 2010 looked at risk perceptions in two ways. First, an open-ended question which invited respondents to say ‘what comes to mind when they think about possible problems and risks associated with food and eating’, and second a closed question asked respondents to rate the extent to which they worry about 17 food-related risks, including pesticides in fruit and vegetables (EFSA, 2010). The most frequent response to the open question was ‘chemicals and pesticides’, mentioned spontaneously by 17% of Europeans – 7% mentioned genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the closed question 74% of Europeans say they are fairly or very worried about pesticides in fruit and vegetables – the highest percentage of worry across 17 food risks. Sixty-seven per cent say they are fairly or very worried about GMOs. The 2010 survey replicated a number of questions from EFSA’s first Risk Issues Eurobarometer in 2005 (EFSA, 2005). The findings on worry about pesticides in fruit and vegetables show an increase of 4% over the period – 12 countries show a 4% or more increase in worry, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands and Sweden. Overall, it appears that pesticides in fruit and vegetables are not only the top concern among Europeans, but also an increasing concern.

Bordering on the Unknown: Approaches to Global Civil Society Data

The Global Civil Society Yearbook programme has always involved efforts to collate and collect data that might inform our understanding of this complex phenomenon. In addition to the empirical evidence used by chapter authors, we have included sections of quantitative data in most editions. These have been compiled from a number of sources and presented in various formats, following a conceptual framework devised by Helmut Anheier (Anheier 2001). The concepts that are central to the study of global civil society (GCS) do not lend themselves easily to the classical, conventional research methods and methodologies of the social sciences. Anheier and Katz have explored a number of ways in which existing data might be analysed for GCS studies, whilst Timms has managed a pilot study in collecting new data on civil society events through a network of GCS correspondents, and Pianta has collected data on parallel summits and GCS events. At the same time, the evolving literature about the nature of GCS has produced some key theoretical principles from which methodologies for capturing GCS might be further developed. And lastly, technologies enabling citizens to report data themselves have become widely accessible and increasingly used by civil society actors. In this chapter we outline the nature and challenges of operationalising GCS with empirical data, and propose a new data collection initiative that builds on the latest practical and theoretical contributions to this project.