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"Trust and cooperation are at the heart of the two most important approaches to comparative politics - rational choice and political culture. Yet we know little about the relationship of trust to political institutions. This book sets out a rationalist theory of how informal institutions can affect trust without reducing it to fully determined expectations. It then shows how this theory can be applied to comparative political economy, in particular to explaining inter-firm cooperation in industrial districts, geographical areas of intense small firm collaboration. The book compares trust and cooperation in two prominent districts in the literature, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, and Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

Roy Germano argues for an "analytic filmmaking," which would use film as a means to elucidate social scientific laws and generalizations. Yet film, even when it seeks simply to document the truth, is a form of narrative. To strip these ambiguities away in the name of a crude empiricism would rob these narratives of just that kind of information that makes them most valuable—the subtleties and nuances that they can capture and that simple transcripts cannot. Better models for understanding film can be found either in the direct acknowledgment and exploration of these ambiguities, or, alternatively, in the "analytic narratives" approach. Unlike Germano's analytic film making, which prizes the abstract over the particular, analytic narratives gather their energy from the continuing tension between the particular and the abstraction.

This is a response to the article by Ethan Zuckerman "New Media, New Civics?" published in this issue of Policy & Internet (2014: vol. 6, issue 2). Dissatisfaction with existing governments, a broad shift to "post‐representative democracy" and the rise of participatory media are leading toward the visibility of different forms of civic participation. Zuckerman's article offers a framework to describe participatory civics in terms of theories of change used and demands places on the participant, and examines some of the implications of the rise of participatory civics, including the challenges of deliberation in a diverse and competitive digital public sphere. Henry Farrell responds.

Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the Internet and political outcomes. This will allow scholars to disentangle the relevant causal relationships and contribute to important present debates over whether the Internet exacerbates polarization in the United States, and whether social media helped pave the way toward the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Over time, ever fewer political scientists are likely to study the Internet as such, as it becomes more and more a part of everyday political life. However, integrating the Internet's effects with present debates over politics, and taking proper advantage of the extraordinary data that it can provide, requires good causal arguments and attention to their underlying mechanisms. Adapted from the source document.