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This book tackles the issues involved and explores strategies to deal with many of the problems of establishing equivalence. Each contribution focuses on a theoretically relevant theme, such as: tolerance; political values; religious orientations; gender roles; voluntary associations; party organizations and party positions; democratic regimes, and the mass media. Each chapter covers different topics, methods, data and countries, making use of research to show the problems of finding similar or identical indicators in realistic research settings

Protest emerges in different forms in different countries. A strategy is presented here to deal with country-specific forms of protest by developing equivalent instead of identical measures in 13 advanced democracies around the world. The main substantive results show, first, a clear distinction between direct forms of protest and organizational actions. Yet the specific compositions of these two modes differ between countries. Second, common cross-national subsets of items comprising only three forms for direct actions (demonstrating, petitioning, boycotting) and also for organizational protest (humanitarian/charitable, self-help, consumer organizations). Third, several forms of protest can be used as country-specific expansions of the common three-item sets. Apparently, constructing equivalent instead of identical measures for protest is most important for the detection of relatively small sets of common cross-national indicators and for the accompanying disclosure of country-specific forms of protest. Due to the small percentages of protesters, applying equivalent measures and identical measures of protest largely produces the same results for the positioning of countries from a cross-national perspective.

The benevolent consequences of social capital are clearly related to membership in voluntary associations. Irrespective of the type of association, members in voluntary associations in 19 European democracies show higher levels of satisfaction with democracy and higher levels of political engagement than nonmembers. "Bad" forms of social capital are not widely spread among voluntary associations, but potentially any type of association can be depicted as a "bad" form of social capital. In particular, religious organizations frequently appear as an example of "bad" social capital. Because this last conclusion is related to political saliency, only a few "dark shades" in the mainly sunny world of voluntary associations in Europe can be observed.