Abstract. This article examines whether social class influences the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism in Western Europe. Political consumption is the intentional buying or abstention from buying (boycotting) specific products for political, ethical, or ecological reasons. The interest in analyzing political consumerism lies in substantive and theoretical reasons. First, it is a widespread but not very adequately studied form of noninstitutionalized political participation.

Abstract. This article examines national parliamentarians’ approval of the increased budgetary capacity of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in autumn 2011. Following the analysis of vote outcome and plenary debates in 11 euro states, it is found that the financial position of a state (creditors versus debtors) does not explain the patterns of support and opposition. Rather, two other factors account for these differences: Euroscepticism, and the government and opposition cleavage.

Abstract. We study the location of the inventive activity of 59 major European food and beverage multinationals and their 8432 subsidiaries worldwide, by analysing the geographical distribution of the inventors listed in the European Patent Office (EPO) applications, US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patents and triadic, international and Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent families of the companies filed between 1978 and the early 2000s. The sampled companies tend to locate their R&D activities in the home country.

Abstract. This article describes an analysis of keywords which was aimed at revealing publication patterns in the field of renewable energy, including the temporal evolution of its different research lines over the last two decades. To this end, we first retrieved the records of the sample, then we processed the keywords to resolve their obvious problems of synonymy and to limit the study to those most used.