Municipal Politics Research Articles

Gender inequality in Assam

Democracy may be seen as a critical component of human development in its broadest sense. It is a need for human advancement. Democracy contributes to the achievement of the broader objectives of society’s growth. In a democratic society, everyone, including men and women, is encouraged to take an active role in the free and fair election of their representatives. Everyone in the world benefits from democracy because it ensures that everyone has the same opportunities for success, equal rights, and the opportunity to participate in government activities, as well as a society that is free from prejudice. Contrast to this fundamental concept of democracy, women are more obviously barred from participation in politics and from many aspects of everyday life in a nation like India. Women in India are dissatisfied with national, state, and even municipal politics, despite the fact that over half of the country’s women are still barred from participating in policy and decision-making. Similarly, Assam, India’s north-eastern state, is not an exception in this respect. Accordingly, in this article an attempt has been made here to explore the extent of participation of women in political activities as well as the factors influencing participating of women in politics.

Levels of Conceptualization and Municipal Politics: Replication in a New Context

Since Angus Campbell and colleagues introduced the Levels of Conceptualization (LoC) framework as a measure of political sophistication, only a very small number of scholars have applied this approach to understanding how electors view political actors. In 2008, Michael Lewis-Beck and colleagues replicated this foundational study and found similar results using much more recent data on American national elections. In this brief research report, we replicate the work of Lewis-Beck and colleagues in the Canadian municipal context. Using survey data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, we make use of open-ended responses about attitudes towards mayoral candidates to conduct a qualitative examination of the manner in which survey respondents from eight Canadian cities view mayoral candidates. Despite the relative dearth of ideological cues at the local level, we nevertheless find that a noteworthy portion of the electorate views candidates in ideological terms. Like previous work on the subject, we find that high levels of conceptualization are positively associated with turnout, education, political knowledge, and ‘political involvement’.

The Ideological Structure of Municipal Non-Ideology.

This paper explores the structure of elite disagreement about the ideological or nonideological character of municipal politics. I propose two possible relationships between a representative's own ideology and their beliefs about the character of municipal politics: an "ends-against-the-middle" pattern, in which ideologues on the left and right embrace an ideological vision of municipal politics, whereas moderates insist that municipal politics is not ideological; and an "asymmetric visions" pattern, in which individuals on the left endorse an ideological view of municipal politics and those on the right oppose it. I use new survey data from more than 800 mayors and councillors in Canada to assess these possible relationships. While both are supported by the data, the asymmetric visions pattern is the stronger of the two: the nonideological view of municipal politics is most firmly embraced by municipal politicians of the moderate right, while the ideological vision is most common among representatives on the left. This pattern, I argue, is in keeping with a century of municipal political history and should be incorporated into our theories of municipal elections, representation, and policy disagreement.

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

AbstractTo enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

The gendered digital turn: Canadian mayors on social media

Women continue to occupy lesser positions of power at all political levels in Canada, although scholars still argue on the accessibility of municipal politics to women. However, no previous study has systematically examined the gender ratio of mayors across Canada, as well as their (active) use of social media platforms in a professional capacity. Using novel data, this study examines the variation in social media adoption and active use by gender outside of an electoral campaign. Results show that there is a higher proportion of women mayors who have a Facebook page, as well as Twitter and Instagram accounts and who actively use them outside of electoral campaigns, when compared with men mayors’ social media practices.

The Role of the ‘Cities for Change’ in Protecting the Rights of Irregular Migrants in Spain

Have the new municipalist pro-migrant policies succeeded in protecting the rights of irregular migrants? Cities in Spain have powers to design and implement services and programs aimed at the reception and integration of immigrants. Cities can also include those who are in vulnerable conditions, guaranteeing them access to healthcare, minimum income coverage or labour training, regardless of the immigration status. However, old municipal politics have been characterised by pragmatism, being mainly focused on regular immigrants. Besides, there has been a restrictive and punitive turn in immigration policy directly connected to the economic recession and austerity as of 2008. To explore what possibilities do cities have to expand and protect the rights of irregular immigrants, we analyse in this contribution the cases of Madrid and Barcelona for the years 2015–2019 when progressive municipalists fronts ruled the cities. Based on the textual analysis of policy documents and in-depth interviews with political parties, street-level bureaucrats and activists, we first examine the competencies that municipalities have in migration matters and mainstream approaches in Spain. Then we discuss the action of the new municipalism, focusing the analysis on four political measures that have been rebel and innovative in protecting irregular immigrants, namely, the proactive census, the prevention of irregularity, access to healthcare and changes in police protocols. These real experiences allow us to argue that cities can achieve changes in the way state control is enforced. However, the analysis also shows tensions between the political will and institutional constraints.

Skirts Rolled Up

This essay considers the participation of Port-au-Prince women in municipal and national politics during the later decades of the nineteenth century. The growth of Port-au-Prince changed the dynamics of these contests, as newly arrived women joined expanding popular neighborhoods, and many assumed a central role in feeding the city. Women moved freely through the heart of the capital and the immediate countryside on personal, commercial, and sometimes directly political itineraries. While formally excluded from electoral politics, working women made their political desires well known, as they exerted an influence on the military movements that toppled the administration several times. These armed contests, as well as the stratification and militarization of the political scene during peacetime, provoked gendered violence. Simultaneously, working women confronted disdain from journalists who would discipline the women’s great influence. Nevertheless, these women commanded considerable respect in political contests that often seemed to have as their stakes the very independence of the nation itself.

Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database

AbstractThis research note describes the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (CMED), a new publicly available and actively maintained dataset of more than 24,000 municipal elections in Canada. We describe the need for high-quality election results data for municipal politics research and describe the content, sources and construction of the CMED. To illustrate the value of the CMED, we estimate gender differences in municipal electoral performance for the first time, finding that women are, on average, more likely than men to win municipal elections in Canada.

Conflating blackness and rurality: Urban politics and social control of africans in Guangzhou, China

In April, 2020, amid widespread fear of a second wave of infections of the novel coronavirus in China, local authorities in Guangzhou cracked down on the city's black population, resulting in mass evictions of Africans. The incident raises several questions about racism in China. How should we interpret this heavy-handed treatment of black people? Was this an isolated incident? What motivated such operations? In this article, I explain social control of Guangzhou's African communities as a problem of municipal politics. What underlies the government's heavy handed approach, I argue, are those communities' ties to rurality, which constitute a roadblock in the city's urban upgrade. Using Dengfeng Village, one of the best known African communities in China, as a case study, I show that efforts to upgrade the area by the local state and the real estate industry were frustrated by the community's status as an urban village. Africans, whom Chinese have historically associated with rurality, are seen as contributing to a space that has long been stigmatized as a spatial manifestation of rural people's lack of self-discipline. To better reveal the interconnection between social control and urban politics, I place official action in context of the history of the community's formation and the lived experience. This analysis of Dengfeng applies to various extents to other major African communities in Guangzhou. © 2020 This is an Open Access.

Plano Municipal de Educação e Projeto Político Pedagógico: trilhas da práxis formativa

This text, critically addresses, the issue of education management in order to apprehend elements of a formative planning process based on the relationship between the Secretariat's Action Plan and the Municipal Education Plan (PME) and Political Pedagogical Project instruments. In general, we can declare that the principles of democratic management and participation are basic elements in a planning process for these instruments and that, according to the consonance of subnational plans with the National Education Plan, they are also articulators of education in the municipality. The data analyzed make it possible to indicate that the Secretariat's Action Plan planning process is developed in a distinct and disputed manner, with the idea of a plan standing out as an end in itself and without articulation.

Criação de novos municípios: uma revisão sobre a literatura presente no Portal de Periódicos da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Com a promulgação da Constituição Federal de 1988, houve uma notória fragmentação do território brasileiro a partir da criação de milhares de novos municípios. Diante disso, busca-se realizar uma revisão de literatura na plataforma Portal de Periódicos da CAPES, utilizando a palavra-chave “criação de municípios”, para compreender os fatores que levaram a esta acelerada fragmentação. Dessa forma, percebe-se que a criação de novas municipalidades ocorreu de maneira semelhante em vários municípios do Brasil e encontra-se atrelada a diversos fatores, dentre eles: busca pela autonomia municipal da localidade e fatores políticos, econômicos e jurídicos.

Pocketbook policing: How race shapes municipal reliance on punitive fines and fees in the Chicago suburbs

AbstractThis article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects with policies that encourage competition over tax revenue to produce fiscal inequalities that fall along racial lines. Officials across the region shared views about ‘good’ revenues like sales taxes paid mostly by nonresidents, but those in black suburbs were unable to access them and instead turned to ‘bad’ revenues like legal fines to manage fiscal crises—even where residents were fairly affluent and despite the absence of discriminatory intent at the local level. These findings invite inquiry into the racially uneven consequences of seemingly colorblind municipal fiscal practices in the USA and the distributional consequences of municipal governance in other national contexts.

Do “Non-Partisan” Municipal Politicians Match the Partisanship of Their Constituents?

Recent research in the United States has found that municipal governments are responsive to the ideological complexion of their cities even in the absence of partisan elections. In this paper, I test for the presence of party match—a match between the partisan character of a district and the partisanship of its municipal representative—in Canada, where municipal elections are distinctively non-partisan. Using new data on district-level party support and the partisanship of Canadian municipal politicians, I find clear evidence for party match. This match is equally likely in at-large and ward elections, partisan and non-partisan elections, and large and small cities. I thus argue that partisan and ideological representation is an important and widespread feature of Canadian municipal politics. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of municipal representation and the role of ideology in municipal politics.

Between pastors and psychiatrists: A qualitative analysis of municipal politics and drug treatment policies in the Brazilian crack cocaine “epidemic”

Between pastors and psychiatrists: A qualitative analysis of municipal politics and drug treatment policies in the Brazilian crack cocaine “epidemic”

“No Med School!” Black Resistance to The New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD) Urban Renewal Proposal, Between 1960 and 1970

This article is a historiographical study of urban renewal in Newark, New Jersey. The paper offers a cross-sectional view of policymaking and appropriation at the federal and local levels, which is critical when analyzing the delimitations of ethnic coalition building. The article centers on a typological study of Black resistance to the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD) construction project that was slated to commence around 1965-1966. NJCMD, renamed the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey (UMDNJ) in 1981, was initially proposed as a revitalization project that would stymie urban decay in Newark. However, the project proposal would also displace close to 22,000 people in the Central Ward—a predominately poor, majority Black section of Newark. Using social movement scholarship, specifically the literature on resource mobilization during the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, this article examines the distinct ways that Black residents of Newark responded to the NJCMD project. The response involved community board meetings, rallies, and surveys that ultimately led to significant overhauls of NJCMD’s initial design. Black resistance to NJCMD also culminated in the 1970 election of Kenneth Gibson, Newark’s first Black mayor. Key concepts such as “collective action framing” and “frame diffusion” inform this study of grassroots mobilization and community resistance. Also included in this work is an exploration of Black Power politics, its key figures in Newark, and the impact that such solidarity movements had on municipal politics. A thorough analysis of “pressure politics” and “protest politics” in the public sphere will also shed light on how racial exclusion frames elections and electorates.

Confident and cautious candidates: Explaining under‐representation of women in Danish municipal politics

AbstractWhy are women under‐represented even in democratic and egalitarian countries? Previous research considers either demand‐side or supply‐side explanations. We integrate both perspectives in a least‐likely case for the under‐representation of women, namely the municipal councils in Denmark. The data stems from a candidate choice conjoint experiment, a survey among potential candidates, and data on the actual pool of nominated candidates. On the voter demand‐side, we show that there is no pro‐male bias in general or in combination with other candidate traits nor that traits evaluated positively by voters appear more frequently among actual male candidates. On the supply‐side, we find that women are less likely to be interested in running for political office. This is primarily because women assess their own political qualifications significantly lower than men. The under‐supply of female candidates seem to drive the disparity suggesting that we should focus more on supply‐side factors to overcome the gender imbalance.

Book review: Municipal Politics in Turkey: Local Government and Party Organisations

Book review: Municipal Politics in Turkey: Local Government and Party Organisations

‘Greening our backyard’- health behavior impacts of the built environment within the overall ecology of active living

ABSTRACT The Jerusalem Railway Park illustrates the ecology of active living, being an urban infrastructure created with broad citizen engagement. It connects residential and commercial areas housing diverse populations while facilitating active lifestyles. In this study, we sought to understand 55 and above-aged residents’ perceptions regarding an environmental change in their neighborhood, and how it frames their lifestyle choices. Mixed-methods tools were used creating an eight-categorical tree that models the main perceptions raised. That tree can be evaluated and mapped ecologically. Our results show that living in proximity to the park encourages engagement in active lifestyle behaviors. Beyond the latter, the data reveal linkages between the health impact of the park and the ecology of its creation, maintenance, community cohesion, inter-ethnic relations, municipal politics, transportation systems, and environmental concerns in a sometimes tense city. The paper illustrates how health effects interact synergistically with other components of urban systems to improve quality of life.

'Take back control': English new municipalism and the question of belonging

'Take back control' has been a central mobilising theme of recent British politics. The new municipalism will be critical to addressing this demand without indulging in nativism and ethno-nationalism, though to do so it must answer the question of how to fashion progressive belonging in a multi-ethnic, post-colonial nation. After a brief discussion of the British left's responses to this question, this article looks at the ways in which some of the international new municipalist platforms have sought to reshape the nation state's politics of identity and belonging; it then explores these ideas on the ground in terms of current municipal politics in England, looking at a number of different places including Preston and Wigan, and with a longer discussion of a recent project in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Municipalism and feminism then and now

Hilary Wainwright discusses municipalism and its relationship to feminism, past and present. She discusses how the women's liberation movement and in particular its creation of collective childcare produced a form of prefigurative politics which also opened up the possibilities of women being more active. She also discusses her involvement in the Greater London Council in the 1980s and its particular form of municipal politics, which included empowering communities, supporting co-operatives, an alternative industrial strategy and a progressive procurement policy. All these examples of 'power as transformative capacity' rather than 'power-over', are related to contemporary forms of municipalism, from Preston to Barcelona, and point to the necessity of local government as a necessary space of engagement in the wake of the 2020 general election.