Local Government and the Meanings of Political Representation: A Case Study of Bologna between 1860 and 1915

Modern Italy ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Axel Körner
Keyword(s):  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Local Council

SummarySince the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's local council. Local perceptions of national events, like the government's reaction to Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed major symbolic meaning in local politics and challenged traditional understandings of municipal administration by introducing the concept of political opposition. In Bologna, after Rome the second city of the former Papal State, the Moderates were able to grow into a position of political hegemony after the Unification of Italy and remained the predominant political force also after Italy's “parliamentary revolution” of 1876 and the electoral reforms of the 1880s. As a consequence of its limited influence on the local administration, Bologna's Left defined its ideological profile earlier and more clearly than the Left in other parts of Italy and integrated issues of national importance into local political discourse. Analysing the relationship between central administration and periphery, the article reveals the development of political language and the changing meanings of political representation between Unification and World War One and explains on this basis the escalation of social and political conflict in Finesecolo Italy.

Women's History and Gender History: The Italian Experience

Modern Italy ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Fiume
Keyword(s):  
Political Representation ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
City Council ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Italian Experience

SummarySince the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's city council. Local perceptions of national events, like Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed a significant symbolic meaning and challenged traditional understandings of local administration by introducing notions of political opposition. In Bologna, the second city of the former Papal State, the Moderates were able to form a political hegemony after the Unification of Italy and remained the predominant political force also after the parliamentary revolution of 1876 and the electoral reforms of the 1880s. Due to its limited influence on the local administration, Bologna's Left defined its ideological profile earlier and more clearly than the Left in other parts of Italy and integrated issues of national importance into local political discourse. Illustrating the relationship between central administration and the periphery, the article analyses the development of political language and changing meanings of political representation on the local level between Unification and World War One.

Het publiek in de tribune : vormen van politieke informatie

Res Publica ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
Guido Dierickx
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Discriminating Power ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Rules Of The Game

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer».  From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations.  The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, local politics social problems, political issues ?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the (relevant) dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations.

Enforcement, Integration, and the Future of Immigration Federalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Intergovernmental Relations ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Integration Policy

The federal government has a monopoly over the terms of immigration law, and it superintends the nation's singular immigration enforcement bureaucracy. But our federalism nonetheless provides a vital playing field for sharp debates over the status of immigrants in American life. The forms of state and local involvement in immigration policy are varied, but they fall into two basic categories of mutually dependent and re-enforcing policies: enforcement federalism and integration federalism. Whereas enforcement federalism concerns the extent to which localities should assist or resist federal removal policies, integration federalism encompasses measures designed to assist immigrants, regardless of status, to plant roots and acculturate to life in the United States. Both forms of immigration federalism take shape through a wide variety of intergovernmental relations, not only between the federal government on the one hand and states and localities on the other, but also between states and the cities within them — an increasingly important dimension of immigration federalism today. These relations have important legal characteristics, and constitutional and statutory law bring them into being and mediate them. But the nature of any given intergovernmental dynamic will be shaped just as much by a combination of ideology and institutional imperatives. These elements can either unite the center and the periphery in common cause or produce the sort of conflict that has made immigration federalism a high-profile issue for decades. Given the density of the intergovernmental dynamics that shape the country's immigration policy, developing a comprehensive strategy for immigration federalism requires more than a predilection toward or away from centralization of government authority. It requires a clear view on the appropriate metes and bounds of immigration enforcement, as well as a set of beliefs about the proper place in the social order of immigrants with different legal statuses. While this essay remains largely (though not entirely) agnostic on these questions, it offers four basic principles to frame any future federalism agenda. First, when it comes to enforcement federalism, the federal government ought to acknowledge the reasons that localities might resist federal enforcement efforts, at least as a matter of politics, and if only to ensure that federal policy is subjected to accountability checks by competing, external pressures. Second, whatever the value of resistance to enforcement, a federalism agenda should include efforts by all levels of government to identify a manageable equilibrium that reconciles the federal government's constitutional and statutory responsibilities for maintaining an enforcement regime with the local politics of immigration and the lived realities of immigrant communities. Third, when it comes to integration federalism, the problem of illegal immigration must be solved, and only the federal government can do so decisively. Federalism can only mediate the political conflict over status and help set the terms for its ultimate resolution. And yet, the structural reasons that have given rise to integration federalism should re-enforce the country's commitment to locally driven integration policy, supported by a national-level commitment to information sharing, coordination, and resource support. Finally, because both enforcement and integration policy require systemic flexibility, it is important not to confuse arguments on the merits of immigration policy with structural claims. In other words, scholars, advocates, or policymakers should exercise humility and circumspection when developing conversation-stopping claims that a certain intergovernmental relation is required by law, especially in a context as charged as immigration policy.

MECHANISMS FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL TAXES AND INSURANCE

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (13) ◽  
pp. 121-130
Author(s):  
Anatolii Petrovich Mykolaiets
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Production Management ◽  
National Level ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Environmental Taxes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Natural Form

It is noted that from the standpoint of sociology, “management — a function of organized systems of various nature — (technical, biological, social), which ensures the preservation of their structure, maintaining a certain state or transfer to another state, in accordance with the objective laws of the existence of this system, which implemented by a program or deliberately set aside”. Management is carried out through the influence of one subsystem-controlling, on the other-controlled, on the processes taking place in it with the help of information signals or administrative actions. It is proved that self-government allows all members of society or a separate association to fully express their will and interests, overcome alienation, effectively combat bureaucracy, and promote public self-realization of the individual. At the same time, wide direct participation in the management of insufficiently competent participants who are not responsible for their decisions, contradicts the social division of labor, reduces the effectiveness of management, complicates the rationalization of production. This can lead to the dominance of short-term interests over promising interests. Therefore, it is always important for society to find the optimal measure of a combination of self-management and professional management. It is determined that social representation acts, on the one hand, as the most important intermediary between the state and the population, the protection of social interests in a politically heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, it ensures the operation of a mechanism for correcting the political system, which makes it possible to correct previously adopted decisions in a legitimate way, without resorting to violence. It is proved that the system of social representation influences the most important political relations, promotes social integration, that is, the inclusion of various social groups and public associations in the political system. It is proposed to use the term “self-government” in relation to several levels of people’s association: the whole community — public self-government or self-government of the people, to individual regions or communities — local, to production management — production self-government. Traditionally, self-government is seen as an alternative to public administration. Ideology and practice of selfgovernment originate from the primitive, communal-tribal democracy. It is established that, in practice, centralization has become a “natural form of government”. In its pure form, centralization does not recognize the autonomy of places and even local life. It is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, but it is also widely used by democratic regimes, where they believe that political freedoms should be fixed only at the national level. It is determined that since the state has achieved certain sizes, it is impossible to abandon the admission of the existence of local authorities. Thus, deconcentration appears as one of the forms of centralization and as a cure for the excesses of the latter. Deconcentration assumes the presence of local bodies, which depend on the government functionally and in the order of subordination of their officials. The dependency of officials means that the leadership of local authorities is appointed by the central government and may be displaced.

Turnout in Multi-Level Systems

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Ignacio Lago ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Elisabeth Gidengil ◽  
Thomas Gschwend
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Level ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
European Elections ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Different Levels

Voters face different incentives to turn out to vote in one electoral arena versus another. Although turnout is lowest in European elections, it is found that the turnout is only slightly lower in regional than in national elections. Standard accounts suggest that the importance of an election, in terms of the policy-making power of the body to be elected, drives variation in turnout across elections at different levels. This chapter argues that this is only part of the story, and that voter attachment to a particular level also matters. Not all voters feel connected to each electoral arena in the same way. Although for some, their identity and the issues they most care about are linked to politics at the national level, for others, the regional or European level may offer the political community and political issues that most resonate with them.

scholarly journals Horizontal interactions in local personal income taxes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Population Size ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Personal Income ◽  
Set Covering ◽  
Tax Rates ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Relative Population ◽  
Tax Rate ◽  
Local Council

AbstractTheories of inter-jurisdictional tax and yardstick competition assume that the tax decisions of one jurisdiction will influence the tax decisions of other jurisdictions. This paper empirically addresses the issue of horizontal dependence in local personal income tax rates across jurisdictions. Based on a large data set covering Swedish municipalities over a period of 14 years, we test for interactions across municipalities that share a common border, across municipalities within a distance of 100 km of each other, and across municipalities with similar political representation in the local council. We also test the hypothesis that the tax rate of relatively larger municipalities has a greater influence on their neighbors' tax rate compared to the influence of their smaller neighbors. Our results suggest that when lagged tax rates are controlled for, the horizontal correlation across municipalities that share a common border or are within a distance of 100 km from each other becomes insignificant. This result is of importance as it suggests that lagged tax rates should be included or at least tested for when testing for horizontal interactions or mimicking in local tax rates. However, our results support the hypothesis of horizontal interactions across municipalities that share a common border when the influence of neighboring municipalities is also weighted by their relative population size, i.e. relatively larger neighbors tend to have a greater impact on their neighbor's tax rates than their relatively smaller neighbors. This is of importance as it suggests that distance or proximity matters, although only in combination with the relative population size. We also find some evidence of horizontal dependence across municipalities with similar political preferences.

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