The historic decrease in the crime rate reported within many U.S. cities during the past decade provides an opportunity to determine if police officers would rank other stressors higher when the ubiquitous crime factor is proportionally minimized. This study tests the assumption that law enforcement officers would experience lower levels of stress during an extended period of relatively low crime rates and predominantly report external, non-crime related factors as primary stressors. Stressor sources were measured from a sample of 1,022 police officers within a major northeastern U.S. city during an era of significantly declining crime rates. A description and mean ranking of organizational, job-related, and external stressors were presented for the sample, as were representative ranges of job tenure, rank, gender, race, work shift, and assignment areas. The results indicated generally moderate levels of stress and some distinctions in the variable categories while affirming the significance of select stressors identified within the literature.

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has the potential to significantly change the dynamics of interaction between EU institutions and civil society, which we conceive as a field. This article analyzes how the EU civil society field has been re‐shaped by the ECI, the creation of networks and relationships between EU and national organizations and the effects of politicization. Using interview data and online documents from five ECI cases, we argue that an ECI can potentially transform the meta‐field of civil society and democracy by altering what is at stake. We show that the five cases compete in a single field of civil society in the EU where incumbent organizations react to challenges. However, the field cannot be characterized in terms of a competition between insiders and outsiders. Rather, the ECI favours actors able to combine activism in different spheres – which we call multi‐positional actors.

EU public policy is notoriously technical and consensus orientated, and dialogue between political institutions and interest groups enhance tendencies for inward looking and elite politics. The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) seems to offer an opportunity to remedy these structural defects. We examine the entire set of more than sixty signature collection campaigns stimulated by the ECI for the degree of contention and type of campaign they bring to EU politics. A key feature of a majority of campaigns involves a diversity of origin, both by territory and campaign source. We record the diverse ways in which the ECI has been utilised by campaigners, noting how campaigns have largely been introduced by a markedly different set of activists than professionalised EU lobbyists, many newly mobilised by a direct participation device, and which may require EU lobby organisations to engage with new forms of campaigning. A key finding is that campaigns originating from sponsors already well linked to EU politics were less likely to be of a contentious nature than those from other sources.

El referéndum del Brexit es un buen ejemplo de la especial vulnerabilidad del proyecto europeo ante la desinformación. Por ello las instituciones han desarrollado una serie de iniciativas durante 2018 para definir una estrategia europea contra la desinformación que enfatiza la responsabilidad de las redes sociales en la denuncia de los contenidos falsos. Además, ante la debilidad de la esfera pública europea, las instituciones europeas apoyan la creación de redes europeas de fact checkers. Esta estrategia implica la denuncia de las mentiras en lugar de una de creación de marcos alternativos, lo que autores como Lakoff (2004) consideran un error desde la perspectiva del framing. Empíricamente demostramos mediante un análisis de las principales redes de actores en este asunto (académicos, fundaciones, think tanks, medios, plataformas de redes sociales y fact checkers) que existe una disputa para definir la mejor forma de combatir la desinformación a escala europea.