Search results for "Economy"

Through the Looking Glass: The Attitudes of Polish Political Parties towards the EU before and after Accession

2009

Abstract The objective of this paper is a comparison of the attitudes of parliamentary parties towards the European Union in terms of Poland's accession to the European Union. Therefore the parliamentary parties' attitudes after the elections in 2001 and 2005 have been analyzed and compared. Another significant aim of this paper is the identification of factors conditioning these attitudes as well as changes in them. The change from a candidate to a member of the EU forced the political parties to redefine their attitudes towards Europe since the character of the European issue itself also changed. This especially applies to those parties which strongly opposed Poland's accession to the EU.…

2018

A vigorous anti-nuclear movement emerged in Germany in the mid 1990s, when spent nuclear fuel elements began to be transported to the interim storage facility in Gorleben, Lower Saxony. Resistance ...

Local interest groups and the perception of power in Spanish cities

2018

Studies on local interest groups have generated a considerable number of theories on urban power that have eventually become the basis of far-reaching approaches on democracy and collective action. Such literature has been especially concerned with discovering who governs the city, paving the way for discussions on elitism, pluralism and urban regimes. Some approaches consider that the business elite dominates local politics, while other theories assert that interests other than business (neighbors, environmentalists, faith-based organizations, civic groups) have been gaining relevance and access to local government. The POLLEADER survey (2006) provided data on the influence of certain soci…

National identity and Europeanization in post-communist Romania. The meaning of citizenship in Sibiu: European Capital of Culture 2007

2008

The structure of the requirements for citizenship in a Romanian city differs by and large from the structure of the same requirements in other European cities. The peculiarity lies in the lack of distinctiveness between the origin, the ethnic aspect and the civic aspect of citizenship and also in the emphasis on the language requirements for citizenship. The explanations could be traced back to the previous century and to the cultural and political project of state and nation-building. But the importance assigned to the national identity and national sovereignty issues in Romania may affect the European integration by hindering the feelings of European belonging and solidarity.

European comission's identity during brexit : a communication strategy change on twitter

2021

The European Union (EU) was founded to promote peace, prosperity and other values between an increasing number of member states (European Commission, 2001). However, Brexit has activated a reputation crisis that reinforces Euroscepticism (Borzel; Risse, 2018). The objective of the study is to identify the differences in the semantic construction and thematic framing of the European Commission during a two-year period, previous to Brexit and after Brexit, on a sample of 4827 tweets posted by the European Commission. Findings show that in the period before Brexit, the EU is presented as an abstract political body, highly informative on major crisis, and reactively framing messages with values…

Eurocity London: a qualitative comparison of graduate migration from Germany, Italy and Latvia

2016

This paper compares the motivations and characteristics of the recent migration to London of young-adult graduates from Germany, Italy and Latvia. Conceptually the paper links three domains: the theory of core–periphery structures within Europe; the notion of London as both a global city and a ‘Eurocity’; and the trope of ‘crisis’. The dataset analysed consists of 95 in-depth biographical interviews and the paper’s main objective is to tease out the narrative similarities and differences between the three groups interviewed. Each of the three nationalities represents a different geo-economic positioning within Europe. German graduates move from one economically prosperous country to another…

The local appropriation of democracy: an analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03

2006

Ever since the ‘democratic renewal’ of 1989–90, Benin has been regarded as a model democracy in the African context. The holding of local elections in 2002–03 can be seen as the culmination of this turn to democracy. Donors attach high expectations to decentralisation and local democracy. Based on an empirical analysis of municipal elections in Parakou, the country's third-largest city, the paper tries to gauge whether these expectations have been realised. The paper argues that while multi-party democracy has been instituted under considerable pressure from the outside, the particular form it has taken derives instead from rationales of national and local politics which go back to the late…

Consolidated challenge to social demand for resilient platforms : Lessons from Uber's global expansion

2017

Many in the industry see the ride-sharing company Uber as the significant advancement through information and communication technology (ICT) particularly of the digital service platform and sharing economy. Uber has been exploring the new frontier of the ICT-driven disruptive business model (IDBM) and succeeded in its global expansion to over 479 cities in more than 75 countries worldwide in June of 2016. Such rapid expansion provides constructive insights regarding the significance of IDBM, not only in transportation but also in almost all other business fields. While at the same time Uber's legal battles in some cities around the world raise a serious question regarding the rationale of I…

Co-evolution of three mega-trends nurtures un-captured GDP – Uber's ride-sharing revolution

2016

Uber used a disruptive business model driven by digital technology to trigger a ride-sharing revolution. The institutional sources of the company’s platform ecosystem architecture were analyzed to explain this revolutionary change. Both an empirical analysis of a co-existing development trajectory with taxis and institutional enablers that helped to create Uber’s platform ecosystem were analyzed. The analysis identified a correspondence with the “two-faced” nature of ICT that nurtures un-captured GDP. This two-faced nature of ICT can be attributed to a virtuous cycle of decline in prices and an increase in the number of trips. We show that this cycle can be attributed to a self-propagating …

Nations in black: charting the national thanatopolitics of mourning across European countries

2019

Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted ...