Contact theory and threat group theory offer contradictory hypothesis regarding the effect of contact with immigrants. Does contact reduce or increases negative attitudes towards immigration? This article integrates both approaches and tests the effect of contact towards immigrants when different contexts are considered. We investigate the effect of the economic environment and the immigrant group size on modifying attitudes towards immigration in the context of Catalonia, which offers a complex environment where traditional hypotheses can be tested. Results show that close contact and family contact with immigrants reduce prejudices. However, mixed results are reported regarding the effect of the economic environment or the immigrant group size. Findings also show that Catalan identity is related to lower levels of negative attitudes towards immigrants, regardless of having experienced contact with foreigners. Results have implications on the impact of context when dealing with the impact of contact on attitudes towards immigration.

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This article introduces a new dataset on regionalist actors' territorial demands and frames in Europe. The FraTerr dataset advances on existing datasets by proposing a more fine-grained understanding of regionalist actors' territorial demands, and is the first to provide comparative data on how these are framed. Methodologically, it develops an original coding scheme for the qualitative content analysis of political documents. Empirically, this approach is applied to a comparative study of regionalist parties and civil society actors in twelve European regions. A preliminary analysis of the data provides new evidence of the complexity of regionalist actors' territorial demands and the multi-dimensional nature of their framing strategies. The dataset has implications for the study of regionalist actors and issues, and for broader scholarly efforts at estimating political actors' territorial issue positions and framing strategies.

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Deliberative systems theorists have for some time emphasised the distributed nature of deliberative values; they therefore do not focus exclusively on ‘deliberation’ but on all sorts of communication that advance deliberative democratic values, including everyday political talk in informal settings. However, such talk has been impossible to capture inductively at scale. This article discusses an electronic approach, Structural Topic Modelling, and applies it to a recent case: the Scottish independence debate of 2012–2014. The case provides the first empirical test of the claim that a deliberative system can capture the full ‘pool of perspectives’ on an issue, and shows that citizens can hold each other to deliberative standards even in mass, online discussion. It also shows that, in deliberative terms, the major cleavage in the ‘indyref’ debate was not so much between Yes and No, but between formal and informal venues.