Background: The purpose of the study was to establish the relationship between local government conflicts and service delivery in Iganga District Local Government by examining the relationship ...between political conflicts and service delivery, assessing the relationship between administrative conflicts and service delivery, and establishing the relationship between procurement conflicts and service delivery. Methodology: The researcher used a case study correlational and cross-sectional survey design characterized by both qualitative and quantitative methods. The population of the study was 75 participants but only 62 were selected as respondents using Krejcie & Morgan (1970). Results: The response rate for the study was 96.7%. Findings identified procurement process conflicts, contract award conflicts, contract management conflicts, budget allocation conflicts, human resource conflicts, oversight conflicts, and protests by political leaders and citizens as common conflicts in Iganga District, There was (r=-0.751, sig=0.001) a negative significant relationship between political conflicts and service delivery in the Iganga District. The correlation between administrative conflicts and the quality of service was -0.244 with a significance value of 0.084. Therefore, there is a weak negative insignificant relationship between administrative conflicts and service delivery in the Iganga district local government. The correlation between procurement conflicts and service delivery was 0.782 with a significance value of 0.001. Conclusion: Therefore, there was a good negative significant relationship between procurement conflicts and service delivery in Iganga District local government. This means that conflicts cause a delay in service delivery as well as limit the quality of services provided by the Iganga District Local Government. Recommendation: The researcher recommends that; political leaders should come up with bylaws that streamline the roles and responsibilities of political and technical staff, administrators should work within given guidelines, and contracts committees should always seek the technical guidance of the technocrats for timely, effective, and quality services.
Since the beginning of the 2010s, the investment in Iran has experienced a continuous and severe fall and the level of the total real investment at the end of 2018 has approximately reached its 2002 ...level. In this paper, we show that the fluctuation of the investment (in machinery) up to the beginning of 2010s can be explained by the use of a regression model which includes macroeconomic variables as well as measures of instability in macro environment. However, this model is not able to predict the investment drop during the 2010s and it seems that other factors play a crucial role in the severe fall of the investment in this decade. We will introduce “Political Conflicts” and “Economic Policy Uncertainty” as two indices which are constructed by applying the text analysis method to the press and digital media from 2002 to 2019. The trend of these two indices show a high degree of uncertainty during the recent decade. We will show that the “Political Conflicts” index can explain the investment drop in the 2010s.
Using data drawn from the adult population in Northern Ireland (N = 1,515), this article examines the relationship between perceived intergroup threat and psychological well-being, taking into ...consideration the mediating role of social identification and the moderating role of political conflict exposure. Results by and large confirmed our predictions that perceived threat would be directly associated with poorer well-being but would also exert a positive indirect effect on well-being via increased social identification. However, these relationships were dependent on individuals' prior conflict exposure, such that the positive indirect relationship between perceived threat and psychological well-being emerged only for two subpopulations: individuals who had high direct and high indirect exposure to conflict, and individuals who had low direct, but high indirect conflict exposure. No indirect effects emerged for individuals with relatively lower conflict exposure. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for research on the consequences of intergroup threat in political conflict settings and beyond.
Party activists have played a leading role in “conflict extension”—the polarization of the parties along multiple issue dimensions—in contemporary American politics. We argue that open nomination ...systems and the ambitious politicians competing within those systems encourage activists with extreme views on a variety of issue dimensions to become involved in party politics, thus motivating candidates to take noncentrist positions on a range of issues. Once that happens, continuing activists with strong partisan commitments bring their views into line with the new candidate agendas, thus extending the domain of interparty conflict. Using cross-sectional and panel surveys of national convention delegates, we find clear evidence for conflict extension among party activists, evidence tentatively suggesting a leading role for activists in partisan conflict extension more generally, and strong support for our argument about change among continuing activists. Issue conversion among activists has contributed substantially to conflict extension and party commitment has played a key role in motivating that conversion.
Social conflicts have repercussions on the mental health of the economically active population.
To adapt and validate the Financial Stress Scale in the context of social conflicts (ESECPS).
An ...instrumental study involving 2,242 owners of small and medium enterprises (50.9% women), aged between 18 and 74 years old, selected through a non-probabilistic purposive sampling. The participants were recruited across three regions of Peru during periods of protests and strikes against the incumbent Peruvian government. The instrument for adaptation was the financial stress scale EFEmp-Cov19, created in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact.
All items proved to be clear, relevant, and representative (V > 0.70). Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed the existence of one underlying factor across the 11 items (KMO = 0.962, Bartlett = 5434.3; df = 55;
< 0.001). However, for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), items 4 and 11 were removed, resulting in support for a unidimensional model with 9 items (
2 = 262.73, df = 23,
< 0.001; RMR = 0.022; TLI = 0.972; CFI = 0.980; and RMSEA = 0.072). Regarding reliability, a very high value was found (
= 0.92).
The ESECPS demonstrates adequate psychometric properties, making it a suitable measure to assess financial stress among Peruvian entrepreneurs facing economic instability and financial threats in the context of social conflicts.
Contemporary large-scale land deals are widely understood as involving the expulsion of people who, in turn, struggle instinctively to resist dispossession This is certainly true in many instances. ...Yet this chain of events evidently does not always occur: large-scale land deals do not always result in people losing the land, and many of those who face expulsion do not necessarily respond with the kind of resistance often expected of them. Indeed, much evidence shows that the nature of and responses to big land deals can (and do) vary across and within 'local communities'. Taking off analytically from a relatively narrow selection of cases, the expulsion-resistance scenario is too often assumed rather than demonstrated, thereby leaving many inconvenient facts undetected and unexplained. This suggests a need to step back and problematise the variable and uneven responses 'from below' to land grabbing, both within and between communities. This paper offers an initial exploration into why poor people affected by contemporary land deals (re)act the way they do, noting how issues and processes unite and divide them. This helps explain variation in political trajectories in the context of land grabbing today.
Studying Native American reservations, and their historical formation, I find that their forced integration of autonomous polities into a system of shared governance had large negative long-run ...consequences, even though the affected people were ethnically and linguistically homogenous. Reservations that combined multiple sub-tribal bands when they were formed are 30% poorer today, even when conditioning on prereservation political traditions. The results hold with tribe fixed effects, identifying only off within-tribe variation across reservations. I also provide estimates from an instrumental variable strategy based on historical mining rushes that led to exogenously more centralized reservations. Data on the timing of economic divergence and on contemporary political conflict suggest that the primary mechanism runs from persistent social divisions through the quality of local governance to the local economic environment.
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on ...scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approaches to political parties and public opinion can be best reconciled and examined through a richer theoretical perspective grounded in motivated reasoning theory. Clearly, parties shape citizens' opinions by mobilizing, influencing, and structuring choices among political alternatives. But the answer to when and how parties influence citizens' reasoning and political opinions depends on an interaction between citizens' motivations, effort, and information generated from the political environment (particularly through competition between parties). The contribution of motivated reasoning, as we describe it, is to provide a coherent theoretical framework for understanding partisan influence on citizens' political opinions. We review recent empirical work consistent with this framework. We also point out puzzles ripe for future research and discuss how partisanmotivated reasoning provides a useful point of departure for such work.
Does the occurrence of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, hurricane, epidemic, heat wave, and/or plague increase the risk of violent civil conflict in a ...society? This study uses available data for 187 political units for the period 1950-2000 to systematically explore this question that has received remarkably little attention in the voluminous literature on civil war. We find that natural disasters significantly increase the risk of violent civil conflict both in the short and medium term, specifically in low- and middle-income countries that have intermediate to high levels of inequality, mixed political regimes, and sluggish economic growth. Rapid-onset disasters related to geology and climate pose the highest overall risk, but different dynamics apply to minor as compared to major conflicts. The findings are robust in terms of the use of different dependent and independent variables, and a variety of model specifications. Given the likelihood that rapid climate change will increase the incidence of some types of natural disasters, more attention should be given to mitigating the social and political risks posed by these cataclysmic events.
Political conflicts thrive on a cycle of violence, the short-circuiting of which is essential for lasting peace. The essay argues that it requires more than a political solution to usher in lasting ...peace. Breaking the cycle of violence once and for all requires a restorative experience of reconciliation. While many stakeholders are at play towards bringing a solution to the political impasse in Naga society, the essay argues that Naga churches have a vital role to play, by providing an alternative to the geopolitical solutions and offering a space for dialogue, reconciliation, and restoration.
PDF
