Directly elected mayors: a route to progressive urban leadership?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Hambleton
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Urban Leadership ◽  
Mayoral Leadership ◽  
Opening Section

Directly elected mayors are on the rise internationally. Enthusiasts for this form of local political leadership claim that it can provide visible, strategic, accountable leadership for cities. Opponents argue that the model concentrates too much power in the hands of one individual, and that it can result in local government decision-making being skewed to serve powerful economic interests. This chapter offers a contribution to this debate. An opening section outlines a way of conceptualising the political space available to place-based leaders. It is then suggested that, in any given locality, there are likely to be different realms of leadership, with players from inside and outside the state making a significant contribution to urban policy making. Three examples of bold and progressive mayoral leadership are then presented in the form of three short cameos: Greater London, UK (in the period 2000-08), Portland, Oregon, USA; and Freiburg, Germany. The comparative discussion of mayoral leadership that follows is structured around three themes: the role of directly elected mayors in expanding place-based power; connecting the realms of place-based leadership and bringing progressive values back into city politics.

Shaping Taxation: Economic Elites and Fiscal Decision-Making in Argentina, 1920–1945

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSÉ ANTONIO SÁNCHEZ ROMÁN
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The Political ◽  
Period Analysis ◽  
Juan Domingo Peron ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Economic Elites

AbstractThis article deals with the process of decision-making in the sphere of taxation in Argentina between 1920 and 1945, focusing on the possible influence of the economic elites in that process. Given the central role of decisions over taxation in any fiscal policy and the momentous transformations that occurred in the Argentine system during this period, analysis of this subject can provide a better understanding of the political role that economic elites in Argentina played between the first presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–22) and the ascent of Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency in 1946. Drawing on three key episodes in Argentina policy-making – the attempt to introduce an income tax in 1923, the response to the Depression in 1931–32, and the crisis of 1942–43, this article suggests that parliamentary institutions had stronger resilience in Argentina than is usually believed, and corporatist arrangements became rooted in Argentina only with difficulties.

Towards a Concept of Interactive Political Leadership

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Eva Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Leaders And Followers ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 3 examines what political leadership means in the age of governance. In unison, theories of metagovernance and recent theories of political leadership provide the necessary building blocks for developing a concept of interactive political leadership that captures what political leadership implies in a context where the members of the political community take an active part in governing society. While metagovernance theory highlights the role of hands-off and hands-on forms of governance in regulating self-governance, new theories of political leadership provide a helpful redefinition of the role of power and the relationship between leaders and followers in political leadership. These important insights pave the way for the development of a concept of interactive political leadership and a specification of nine tasks for political leaders in multi-actor policy-making. The chapter concludes by listing a number of challenges and dilemmas facing politicians who aspire to become interactive political leaders.

Policy Making Is Decision Making: A Response to Hattam

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
John D. Skrentny
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The Political ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
History Of ◽  
Policy Decision Making

How should we explain politics and policymaking in one of the most tumultuous and active periods in the history of the American state? Victoria Hattam and I approach the same topic from different starting points and with different goals. While she argues for attention to grass roots mobilization, I look to the policymaking process. I believe the study of policy change should begin at the center of power, where policy decision-making takes place, and should assume nothing about the relevance or role of the political grass roots. Policymakers themselves are always part of the story of policymaking. Grass roots groups are sometimes key actors, yet their impact on policymaking must be demonstrated, not assumed. Assessing this impact and understanding policy development also requires examining cases of failure along with cases of success, and I believe Hattam's neglect of the comparative framework in my book leads her analysis astray.

Legislators, Bureaucrats, and Canadian Democracy: The Long and the Short of It

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Sigelman ◽  
William G. Vanderbok
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Average ◽  
Canadian Politics ◽  
Strategic Role

The bureaucratization of the political process that characterizes twentieth century politics in many countries has not bypassed Canada—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of government employment and expenditure and, even more dramatically, by the ever-expanding policy-making power of Canadian bureaucracy. One observer sees the civil service as occupying an increasingly strategic role in Canadian politics, a condition thatreflects in part the expanding role of modern government into highly technical areas, which tends to augment the discretion of permanent officials because legislators are obliged to delegate to them the administration of complex affairs, including the responsibility for drafting and adjudicating great amounts of sub-legislation required to “fill in the details” of the necessarily broad, organic statutes passed by Parliament. Some indication of the scale of such discretion is found in the fact that, during the period 1963–8, an annual average of 4,130 Orders-in-Council were passed in Ottawa, a substantial proportion of which provided for delegating authority to prescribe rules and regulations to ministers and their permanent advisers. By contrast, the number of laws passed annually by Canadian federal parliaments is rarely over one hundred.

DICTION and the Study of American Politics

2014 ◽  
pp. 444-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher F. Karpowitz
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political World ◽  
Effective Analysis

A powerful tool for content analysis, DICTION allows scholars to illuminate the ideas, perspectives, and linguistic tendencies of a wide variety of political actors. At its best, a tool like DICTION allows scholars not just to describe the features of political language, but also to analyze the causes and the consequences those features in ways that advance our understanding political communication more broadly. Effective analysis involves helping academic audiences understand what the measures being used mean, how the results relate to broader theoretical constructs, and the extent to which findings reveal something important about the political world. This involves exploring both the causes and the consequences of linguistic choices, including by attending closely to how those texts are received by their intended audiences. In this chapter, the authors review ways in which DICTION has been used and might be used to better understand the role of political leadership, the meaning of democracy, and the effects of political language on the political behavior of ordinary citizens.

Integrating Ecosystem Management and Environmental Media for Public Policy on Public Health and Safety

2018 ◽  
pp. 321-338
Author(s):  
Augustine Nduka Eneanya
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Public Health And Safety

Over the past three decades, the relationship between ecology and public policy has changed because of the increasing role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making. While earlier policy questions might have been solved simply by looking at the scientific technicalities of the issues, the increased role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making requires that we re-examine the methods used in decision-making. Previously, policymakers use scientific data to support their decision-making disciplinary boundaries are less useful because uncertain environmental policy problems span the natural sciences, engineering, economics, politics, and ethics. The chapter serves as a bridge integrating environmental ecosystem, media, and justice into policy for public health and safety. The chapter attempts to demonstrate the linkage between the environmental policy from a holistic perspective with the interaction of air, water, land, and human on public health and safety.

The Violence of Inequality: Race and Lobbying in the Politics of Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-93
Author(s):  
Sappho Xenakis ◽  
Leonidas K. Cheliotis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Criminal Justice Policy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Us

There is no shortage of scholarly and other research on the reciprocal relationship that inequality bears to crime, victimisation and contact with the criminal justice system, both in the specific United States context and beyond. Often, however, inequality has been studied in conjunction with only one of the three phenomena at issue, despite the intersections that arguably obtain between them–and, indeed, between their respective connections with inequality itself. There are, moreover, forms of inequality that have received far less attention in pertinent research than their prevalence and broader significance would appear to merit. The purpose of this chapter is dual: first, to identify ways in which inequality’s linkages to crime, victimisation and criminal justice may relate to one another; and second, to highlight the need for a greater focus than has been placed heretofore on the role of institutionalised inequality of access to the political process, particularly as this works to bias criminal justice policy-making towards the preferences of financially motivated state lobbying groups at the expense of disadvantaged racial minorities. In so doing, the chapter singles out for analysis the US case and, more specifically, engages with key extant explanations of the staggering rise in the use of imprisonment in the country since the 1970s.

Integrating Ecosystem Management and Environmental Media for Public Policy on Public Health and Safety

2021 ◽  
pp. 612-629
Author(s):  
Augustine Nduka Eneanya
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Public Health And Safety

Over the past three decades, the relationship between ecology and public policy has changed because of the increasing role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making. While earlier policy questions might have been solved simply by looking at the scientific technicalities of the issues, the increased role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making requires that we re-examine the methods used in decision-making. Previously, policymakers use scientific data to support their decision-making disciplinary boundaries are less useful because uncertain environmental policy problems span the natural sciences, engineering, economics, politics, and ethics. The chapter serves as a bridge integrating environmental ecosystem, media, and justice into policy for public health and safety. The chapter attempts to demonstrate the linkage between the environmental policy from a holistic perspective with the interaction of air, water, land, and human on public health and safety.

Democratic Perspectives on Interactive Political Leadership

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Eva Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Democratic Representation ◽  
The People ◽  
Input Legitimacy ◽  
The Way

Representative democracy is in transition in theory as well as in practice, and this transition affects the way we think about political leadership and democratic representation. New theories of democracy challenge traditional understandings of what it entails to represent the people, and a mushrooming of new forms of political participation destabilizes traditional views of the role of citizens in democratic decision-making. Chapter 4 shows how these theoretical and empirical developments, which are partially triggered by inherent tensions in democratic thought, promote a turn towards interactive forms of political leadership. Interactive political leadership can potentially alleviate the tensions in democratic thought and strengthen the input legitimacy of representative democracy in times of declining trust in politicians. A turn to interactive political leadership is no panacea. It triggers new dilemmas and challenges for elected politicians.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 293-296
Author(s):  
Yuri G. Raydugin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Risk Quantification ◽  
System Dynamics Modelling ◽  
Project Failures ◽  
Dynamics Modelling ◽  
High Level

This chapter provides a high-level overview of concepts, models, and results discussed in this book. It is accentuated that risk quantification used in decision-making can be tagged as ‘political mathematics’. The political aspects are defined by various realizations of bias from strategic misrepresentation to the Hiding Hand principle. It is pointed out that the mathematical aspects may succumb to the similar realizations of bias as political ones. Recommendations to balance the political and mathematical aspects are proposed. A role of the non-linear Monte Carlo N-SCRA methodology supported by the project system dynamics modelling is established as a role of the Revealing Hand. It should provide ammunition for decision-making before the project approval, not after in a form of lessons learned as the Hiding Hand does. This is a way to decline the invitation to attend a ‘banquette of consequences’ referring to project failures as ‘unpleasant unsurprises’.

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