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Introduction / Koenraad Verboven, Olivier Hekster -- Culture politique imperiale et pratique de la justice : regards croises sur la figure du prince "injuste" / Stephane Benoist, Anne Gangloff -- The decreta and imperiales sententiae of Julius Paulus : law and justice in the judicial decisions of Septimius Severus / Elsemieke Daalder -- The value of the stability of the law : a perspective on the role of the emperor in political crises / Francesco Bono -- Legal education, realpolitik, and the propagation of the emperor's justice / Matthijs Wibier -- Koinoi nomoi : Hadrian and the harmonization of local laws / Juan Manuel Cortes-Copete -- Justice, res publica and empire : subsidiarity and hierarchy in the Roman empire / Frederic Hurlet -- Substantive justice in provincial and Roman legal argument / Clifford Ando -- Zwischen Theorie und Wirklichkeit : Romische Sicherheitsgesetze und ihre Realisierung / Peter Herz -- Geschlechterrollen im romischen Erbrecht im Spiegel des zeitgenossischen Gerechtigkeitsverstandnisses und am Beispiel der lex Voconia / Elena Kostner -- La femme : objet et sujet de la justice romaine / Pilar Pavon Torrejon -- The spectacle of justice in the Roman Empire / Margherita Carucci.

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.