Search results for " public administration"

Informal Disaster Governance

2020

<p>Scholars and practitioners are increasingly questioning formal disaster governance (FDG) approaches as being too rigid, slow, and command-and-control driven. Too often, local realities and non-formal influences are sidelined or ignored to the extent that disaster governance can be harmed through the efforts to impose formal and/or political structures. A contrasting narrative emphasises so-called bottom-up, local, and/or participatory approaches which this article proposes to encapsulate as Informal Disaster Governance (IDG). This article theorises IDG and situates it within the long-standing albeit limited literature on the topic, paying particular attention to the literature’s fa…

Digital discretion: A systematic literature review of ICT and street-level discretion

2018

Contextual perceived group threat and radical right-wing populist party preferences: Evidence from Switzerland

2016

Existing studies suggest that perceived group threat is an important influence on radical right-wing populist party preferences. However, most have focused on perceived group threat at the individual level, overlooking the ideological climate. I examine how an ideological climate of group threat perception as a contextual factor can shape individual preferences for radical right-wing populist party preferences. I argue that above and beyond personal perceived group threat, the prevalence of local perceived group threat exerts a normative influence on personal preferences. Using voting preferences for the Swiss People’s Party, I employ multilevel structural equation modeling to examine the …

Balancing seclusion and inclusion: EU trilogues and democratic accountability

2020

This article assesses how trilogues affect the possibilities to hold the European Parliament to account from the perspectives of democracy as political equality and democracy as epistemic quality. ...

Informal Learning for Citizenship Building in Shared Struggles for Right: Cases of Political Solidarity Between Colombian and Spanish Organisations

2015

[EN]: Dominant discourses and practices in international cooperation have been characterised by depoliticisation and unequal power relationships. However, a number of more transformative experiences of cooperation also exist, where joint work between Northern and Southern social organisations is linked with a more political perspective. These kinds of experiences can be considered processes of informal learning in social action: through shared actions, strategies and frameworks and through interaction between organisations, institutions and the grassroots, informal and multidimensional learning processes occur in the people and organisations engaged. The study approaches four cases of netwo…

The Impact of Regional and National Leaders in Subnational Elections in Spain: Evidence from Andalusian Regional Elections

2021

Abstract Democracies have experienced two trends in the last decades: the growing personalization of politics and the increasing relevance of regions in the political process. This article addresses these trends by posing two questions: Do political leaders influence the vote in regional elections? Do regional party leaders have a larger impact on voter preferences than their national counterparts in regional elections? To answer these questions, we analyzed five regional elections held in Andalusia between 2004 and 2018. The results show that both national and regional leaders matter in regional elections. However, the effect of national and regional leaders is “conditioned” by the charact…

Co-Production in the Context of Finnish Social Services and Health Care: A Challenge and a Possibility for a New Kind of Democracy

2016

Alongside the ongoing renewal process of the Finnish welfare state, the role of the citizens is also revisited. So far the attention has mainly focused on how the responsibility for service provision is shared between the public sector and the service users, while the role of public services as a part of the democratic system has been more or less ignored. Based on the results from a 3-year participatory action research project called KAMPA, this article will discuss if the development of co-production in the context of public welfare services shows the way forward toward a new kind of society where democracy is an inseparable part of the structures and procedures of the service provision. …

Advances to the study of international Public administration

2016

As an area of research, specifying crucial conditions under which international public administration (IPA) may enjoy independence from member-state governments has become an increasingly vibrant research area. This collection responds to three as yet unresolved research tasks: (1) systematically comparing IPAs by offering large-N data across cases; (2) taking organization seriously by identifying how the organizational architectures of IPAs affect decision-making processes and subsequently the pursuit of public policy-making; and (3) examining the varied consequences of the autonomization of IPAs, notably for member-state public sector governance and for the integration of transnational re…

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens' Perspective

2018

In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy …

A partial micro-foundation for the ‘two-worlds’ theory of morality policymaking: Evidence from Germany

2020

The two-worlds framework is currently the most important account of morality policymaking in Europe. For this theory of elite behaviour to be valid, a number of implicit assumptions about political belief systems at the mass level must hold. This contribution spells out these assumptions and tests them within a structural equation modelling framework, using original survey data from Germany, a country that constitutes a crucial case for the two-worlds theory. The results showed that the implicit individual-level preconditions of the two-worlds framework were fulfilled. Political secularism and partisanship were strongly associated. Political secularism also had strong effects on morality p…