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As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, strong political pressures buffeted the Clinton administration. Daily images of death & destruction fueled public sentiment for the administration to "do something" to end the deepening violence & ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The White House chose to steer a middle course, trying to satisfy a public that wanted the administration to take action, but with memories of the ill-fated U.S. intervention in Somalia still strong, did not want to commit U.S. ground forces. 1 Map.

The emergence of online reader comments over the past years has made opinions of readers more visible to journalists and users of news websites. This article discusses whether online reader comments provide a representative picture of the opinion of news site users and how this affects the perceived public opinion. Findings of an online survey among the users of eight Swiss newspapers indicate that comments are not representative since people who write comments tend to differ from those reading the comments with respect to gender, age, and political orientation. Of special interest is the finding that those writing comments tend to be politically further right than those reading comments and that "rightists" are writing more frequently. However, readers of the comments are not aware of this bias, leading to a systematically distorted perception of public opinion. Different types of regulation are discussed with respect to their acceptance as well as their potential impact on comments.

The article presents theoretical and methodical grounds for identification of the subject of public opinion. The author finds out that functional features of public opinion determine the features of subjects too. These features tell about the subject range, structure, how it is organized, how it exerts influence on human behavior and activity of the social institutions which have the status of public opinion object.

The proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021 "Democracy in Flux: Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres" have been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII121, 16DII122, 16DII123, 16DII124, 16DII125, 16DII126, 16DII127,16DII128 – "Deutsches Internet-Institut").

"In the context of the debates on the present and future role of the EU in a globalized world, in this chapter we focus on the prospects for a common EU foreign policy as conditioned by the attitudes of elites and public opinion within the enlarged EU. The main objective is to investigate the patterns of support for the European integration project in the area of foreign, defense and security policy. We analyze the data from a cross-national survey among elites and citizens across Europe, and test explanatory models which provide us with valuable information on what factors drive elite and public opinion attitudes on the issue of a common European foreign policy, controlling for the possible difference between new and old EU member states." (publisher's description)

In this article, we present certain historical developments, problems & successes that have characterised Slovenia's process of joining the EC/EU. The article discusses the difficulties at the bilateral & multilateral level that Slovenia has been experiencing in its attempts to establish closer links with the EU. We examine the general & specific responses of the EU in the course of negotiating the different stages of accession. Slovenia's progress was much less depending on its own economic & political performances than on some discussed issues with neighbouring EU Member States & the multilateral framework of the accession strategy of the EU. The accession criteria do not constitute the only discourse of negotiations. Rather on the opposite, it seems that politics & sometimes certain national & other interests (especially Italy & Austria) prevailed in the negotiations on the acquis. At the end, the article deals with some dilemmas of public support for EU Membership. The gap between political elites & citizens was obvious since public opinion was shifting from a more to a less favourable opinion in the decade before 2001, although finally the trend reversed. Tables, Graphs, References.