•We examine the influence of the multi-level political context on urban sustainability transitions.•We demonstrate how national and subnational institutions enable and/or constrain local agency for ...sustainability transition.•We identify obstacles and opportunities for local transition initiatives based on 102 interviews in four city-regions.•We show how important it is to protect the autonomy of local actors to enable them to react to varying context conditions.•We show that power-sharing effects of federalism help to empower local actors to work towards stainability transition.
Urban sustainability transitions have attracted increasing academic interest. However, the political-institutional contexts, in which these urban sustainability transitions unfold and by which they are incited, shaped, or inhibited, have received much less attention. This is why we aim at extending previous studies of sustainability transitions by incorporating a multi-level governance perspective. While multi-level governance has been a long-standing theme in political science research, it has remained under-explored in the study of sustainability transitions. This claim is the starting point of our comparative analysis of urban sustainability transitions in Brighton (UK), Dresden (Germany), Genk (Belgium) and Stockholm (Sweden). Our approach “brings the politics back in” by elucidating the dynamics of power concentration and power dispersion generated by different national governance contexts. In our analysis, we explore which opportunities and obstacles these diverse governance contexts provide for urban sustainability transitions.
Urban planning and politics in Ghana Cobbinah, Patrick Brandful; Darkwah, Rhoda Mensah
GeoJournal,
12/2017, Letnik:
82, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Through an analysis of Ghana's political and administrative structure, which established the basis of urban planning practice, this paper shows how urban planning has failed to create liveable and ...functional cities in Ghana. This paper uses semistructured interviews and agency consultations to supplement document reviews and news paper articles to address the dearth of research on the subject in Ghana. Findings show that dominant political elites, with little or no urban planning background, control and dictate urban planning activities resulting in chaotic scenes and urban blight across Ghanaian cities. Analyses here reinforce the growing recognition that urban planning outcomes in Ghana, and most African countries are not shaped by professional practice and do not reflect the aspirations of the community, but instead political elites. Urban planning agencies are left vulnerable as their activities are interfered, dictated and hindered by both traditional and mainstream political elites. This paper advocates for independence of urban planning agencies in the performance of their duties.
A positive relationship between assessments of procedural justice and attitudes toward the political system has been identified in many studies of various countries. To quantify this relationship, a ...meta‐analysis was conducted on 69 samples from 50,814 respondents, reported in 37 manuscripts between 1981 and 2021. We found positive correlations between assessments of procedural justice and attitudes toward politicians, political institutions, and the political system in people of different ages and in countries with different political regimes. These positive correlations exist in real and hypothetical situations with various levels of authority. However, two factors moderated the association between the assessment of procedural justice and political attitudes. First, procedural justice as a set of norms is more strongly related to attitudes toward the system than procedural justice as a generalized assessment is. Second, the assessment of procedural justice is more strongly associated with attitudes toward political institutions and the system than attitudes toward the procedures and decisions. Moreover, the percentage of heterogeneity in the obtained models is fairly high; categorical moderators explain 43% of the variance of the effects obtained. The results should therefore be interpreted with consideration of this substantial heterogeneity in the correlations' sizes.
This research examines the depiction of Gajah Mada's political framework in literary works, which aims to dissect concepts such as power dynamics, personal interests, policy formulation, and cultural ...elements, as well as exploring the sharpness of Gajah Mada's leadership.The method used by Alan Swingewood's literary sociology.Data collection and data analysis in this research were carried out by means of literature study, namely first, reading the Gajah Mada novel which was used as the object of study intensively and critically; second, identifying data related to aspects of Gajah Mada's political system; third, inventory or record all identification data.The result of this research is that Gajah Mada's political power, represented as a wise and charismatic leader, highlights Indonesia's need for a democratic, transparent and accountable political system, as well as strengthening national unity and integrity. Gajah Mada's political interests, such as state stability, deconcentration of power, and sustainable development, can be adapted as political alternatives by strengthening checks and balances, independent control institutions, government transparency, community participation, and eradicating corruption. Gajah Mada's political policies succeeded in uniting the archipelago under Majapahit, providing inspiration for Indonesia to improve economic policies, develop justice and eradicate corruption. Gajah Mada's political culture, which involves the mandate of officials, deliberation, and attention to the welfare of the people, can be a basis for strengthening national unity and integrity as well as increasing national awareness through education.
This study is the first to compare the integrative complexity of online user comments across distinct democratic political systems and in discussion arenas with different primary use functions. ...Integrative complexity is a psycho-linguistic construct that is increasingly used by communication scholars to study the argumentative quality of political debate contributions. It captures the sophistication of online user comments in terms of differentiation and integration, mapping whether a post contains different aspects or viewpoints related to an issue and the extent to which it draws conceptual connections between these. This study investigates user contributions on the public role of religion and secularism in society between August 2015 and July 2016 from Australia, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. In each country, it analyzes user posts from the (a) website comment sections and (b) public Facebook pages of mainstream news media, from the (c) Facebook pages of partisan collective actors and alternative media, and from (d) Twitter. Almost as many user contributions implicitly or explicitly differentiate various dimensions of or perspectives on an issue as express unidimensional, simplistic thoughts. Conceptual integration, however, is rare. The integrative complexity of online user comments is higher in consensus-oriented than in majoritarian democracies and in arenas that are used primarily for issue-driven, plural discussions rather than preference-driven, like-minded debates. This suggests that the accommodative public debate cultures of consensus-oriented political systems and interactions with individuals who hold different positions promote more argumentatively complex over simple online debate contributions.
System Justification Theory posits that individuals are less prone to engage in radical action against a system on which they depend. In the present research, we investigated how the association ...between system‐justifying tendencies and radical intentions is moderated by individuals' orientation towards power differentials, namely their “power distance.” A stronger power distance orientation implies that individuals perceive power differentials as a fixed feature of society, curtailing prospects for change. We hypothesized that, at lower levels of power distance orientation, system‐justification tendencies would be associated with reduced radical intentions. We contend this will occur because individuals feel dependent on a system perceived as malleable (dependency hypothesis). Conversely, at higher levels of power distance orientation, we expected system‐justification tendencies to be associated with stronger radical intentions. We argue that this effect reflects the rejection of dependency on a system perceived as fixed (counterdependency hypothesis). This dependency‐counterdependency dynamic was tested using a multigroup latent structural equation model and samples from four countries (NTotal = 2,502), South Korea, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Results were consistent with the hypothesized dynamic across all countries. Theoretical implications of the findings, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
This article investigates the impact of Brexit on the British political system. By critically engaging with the conceptualisation of the Westminster model proposed by Arend Lijphart, it analyses the ...strains of Brexit on three dimensions developed from from Lijphart’s framework: elections and the party system, executive– legislative dynamics and the relationship between central and devolved administrations. Supplementing quantitative indicators with an in-depth qualitative analysis, the article shows that the process of Brexit has ultimately reaffirmed, with some important caveats, key features of the Westminster model: the resilience of the two-party system, executive dominance over Parliament and the unitary character of the political system. Inheriting a context marked by the progressive weakening of key majoritarian features of the political system, the Brexit process has brought back some of the traditional executive power-hoarding dynamics. Yet, this prevailing trend has created strains and resistances that keep the political process open to different developments.
China has sustained double-digit economic growth over three decades. A literature has emerged with one possible explanation: meritocratic promotion, where officials at the same level compete with ...each other on the basis of relative GDP growth, and the winners are rewarded with promotion up the administrative hierarchy. This tournament competition generates strong incentives for politicians to boost growth. I reanalyze this literature, focusing on prefecture-level leaders. I select three papers that study different research questions, but each reports secondary results on meritocratic promotion of prefecture leaders. Reanalyzing these results, I find that the evidence is not robust to alternative control variables, regression specifications, or outcome variables. Overall, I provide an example of a literature seeming to converge on a finding, but where each piece of evidence is unreliable.
The essay examines some of the main works that Tranfaglia published in the 1980s and 1990s with the aim of reconstructing and discussing the historical roots of the political and institutional crisis ...that broke out in Italy after the end of the international Cold War and the national collapse of the so-called First Republic. Two items are examined with particular attention. On the one hand, the reasons for the failure of the reform policy attempted in the 1960s by centre-left governments. On the other hand, the dark plots of power and the birth of terrorism, both of the right and of the left. Two topics that played a fundamental role in his activity as a historian, closely related with his political and civil passion.
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