Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
170,812
result(s) for
"Local Politics"
Sort by:
Civil society organisations and the local politics of migration: how funding contexts matter
Migration studies have highlighted the crucial role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the local politics of migration. Less explored is the impact of the material conditions under which CSOs operate. And yet CSOs delivering public services to migrant and racialised populations often rely on public funding which has been significantly restructured since neoliberal welfare reforms in many Western countries in the 1990s. This article examines how funding contexts shape the opportunities of CSOs to influence local policymaking on migration and migration-related change from a cross-country and cross-city comparative perspective. Based on the empirical analysis of four cities in France and Germany and a comprehensive dataset comprising interviews, observations and documents, we argue that funding contexts significantly impact on CSOs’ potential to shape local policymaking. They do so by enhancing and restricting (1) CSOs’ access to spaces of policymaking as well as (2) CSOs’ capacities for political engagement. We demonstrate the mediating importance of specific funding structures and politics at both national and local scales as well as the role of state-CSO relations in manifesting and reproducing these funding contexts.
Journal Article
(Re)negotiating State Authority: How Hinterland Protests against Global Capital Impact the Mediating Role of Traditional Rulers in Postcolonial Sierra Leone
Sesay draws from three hinterland protests against multinational corporations in the mining and agricultural sectors to examine how global capital influences central/local politics in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Focusing specifically on the mediating role of traditional rulers—a strong legacy of British colonial indirect rule—Sesay argues that hinterland protests not only enable the relative autonomy of rural citizens to (re)negotiate with the state outside existing political arrangements but also challenge the broker authority of these rulers in center/peripheral relations. While some protests form new alignment of interest with traditional rulers, others allow rural citizens to bypass their chiefs to summon the attention of central authorities. In either of these processes, the local constituents question the position of chiefs in the indirect governance system and shape the governing strategies adopted by the central government to rule over the hinterland.
Journal Article
Informal order and the state in Afghanistan
\"Despite vast efforts to build the state, profound political order in rural Afghanistan is maintained by self-governing, customary organizations. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority adapted to become more responsive and deliberative. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and observations from dozens of villages across Afghanistan, and statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys, Jennifer Murtazashvili demonstrates that such authority enhances citizen support for democracy, enabling the rule of law by providing citizens with a bulwark of defence against predatory state officials. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it shows that 'traditional' order does not impede the development of the state because even the most independent minded communities see a need for a central government - but question its effectiveness when it attempts to rule them directly and without substantive consultation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Local News and National Politics
The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.
Journal Article
Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability
This review examines precarity through two foci. First, I focus on related terms of the lumpenproletariat and informal economy, each of which have left their mark on the notion of precarity as a bounded historical condition, and its related notion of the precariat, a sociological category of those who find themselves subject to intermittent casual forms of labor. I explore the ways in which these terms offer pictures of politics and the state that are inherited by the term precarity, understood as the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable contract labor and a loss of state provisioning. I then turn to the second pole of precarity to chart a tension between asserting a common condition of ontological precarity and the impulse to describe the various ways in which vulnerability appears within forms of life.
Journal Article
Centre and periphery within the borders of Islam : proceedings of the 23rd congress of L'Union Europâeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants
This volume contains the Proceedings of the 23rd Congress of L'Union Europâeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants held in Sassari from Thursday 28th of September to Sunday 1st October 2006. The 26 articles contained in the Volume written by specialists from all over Europe (Russia, Finland, Poland, England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands) deal with the following subjects: Islam, History, Society and Archaeology, Literature and Arabic Language and Linguistics. The Central Theme focuses on how the characteristics of Islam and Arabism are to be found in the periphery of the Arabic and Islamic world in relation to its Center and the interchanges implied by the geographic distance between center and periphery. The University of Sassari was the right ambiance for such a Congress since there was in the past some Arabic presence in Sardinia, which island was itself situated at the borders of the Islamic and Arabic Mediterranean.
Book
Representation in Municipal Government
Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens. In the past, the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars’ ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government. We overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every U.S. city and town with a population above 20,000 people. Despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal-conservative positions of their citizens on national policy issues. In addition, we consider the influence of institutions, such as the presence of an elected mayor, the popular initiative, partisan elections, term limits, and at-large elections. Our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government. These results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes, but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments.
Journal Article