Local Political Representation Research Articles

School in the Rural Municipality as an Issue of Politics: Czech Mayors' Attitudes towards the Role and Support of the Local Elementary School

Abstract Public elementary schools in rural municipalities represent key institutional amenities for the communities they serve, and their administrations are part of the broader municipal political structure. This article focuses on the views of Czech mayors regarding the role schools play for municipalities and a consideration of how school operation practice can produce positive outcomes for school and community. Schools have proven to be important local institutions with many social functions for which municipalities have various support tools and strategies. We argue that the good functioning of the school strongly depends on the local political representation’s support. The rural school incorporates both an investment in the physical environment of the municipality and a strategic investment in the human capital for the future generations, and sustainable development of municipalities.

Local political representation as a pathway to power: A natural experiment in India

AbstractWhat drives the career advancement of female politicians in opaque selection environments where party activists hold sway? I argue that women's higher presence in local politics not only improves party elite responsiveness to greater talent supply (top‐down mechanism) but also expands women's capacity to organize grassroots activist networks to influence party‐nomination decisions (bottom‐up mechanism). Using the natural experiment of gender quotas in Delhi, which cause as‐if‐random variation in the number of local reserved seats within state constituencies, I estimate a novel effect of gender quotas. In state constituencies with women's higher presence in local politics, local female politicians are more likely to be promoted, and senior female politicians are more likely to get renominated. Qualitative evidence shows how women leverage grassroots networks and forge informal connections across party hierarchies. The findings emphasize the pivotal role of women's strategic political networks and grassroots organizing in shaping their political careers.

Does Local Political Representation Affect the Childcare Coverage Rate in Austrian Municipalities?

Abstract Historically, the provision of childcare has been a forgotten area of Austrian family policy. During the last decade, much effort was made to catch up with other European countries, but notable differences persist between Austrian regions and municipalities. This article engages the following question: does local political representation affect the public childcare coverage rate in Austrian municipalities? Based on a unique longitudinal data set (2003–2018) containing yearly measures for 1,789 Austrian municipalities, several hierarchical regression models are calculated. The results reveal a positive effect of women and left-party share in the local councils as well as an interaction effect between the two. The findings suggest that women have an impact on the share of children in public childcare only in a right-wing-dominated political sphere.

All Politics Is Local: Studying Women’s Representation in Local Politics in Authoritarian Regimes

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women’s presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women’s engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally.

Women’s political representation in local government: Its impact on public service quality

Public service quality has been a significant issue in Indonesia (Lanin & Hermanto, 2019) along with woman’s representation in politics (Aspinall et al., 2021). This study investigates the effect of woman’s representation in the local government head and legislative positions on public service quality in Indonesian local governments. We use secondary data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a local government website, and the Indonesia Statistics Bureau from 2016–2019, analyzed with panel data regression analysis. Overall, we find that local government public service quality is at a high level. Meanwhile, women’s political representation in Indonesian local government is still considerably low, both in legislative and top executive positions. Empirical findings demonstrate that women’s representation in the legislative board provides a positive impact on public service quality while women’s local government head has no significant effect. The effect is consistent both in district local governments and city local governments observations. Our study provides recommendations that suggest that women’s representation in local politics should be increased to promote gender equality which leads to better public governance

The role of crisis leadership in improving organisational culture during the COVID-19 pandemic among Kwazulu-Natal Christian business leaders

The study wants to know how Christian business leaders navigated the difficult and uncertain times of COVID-19 so that their companies thrived, retained their employees, and continued to operate successfully during a global economic crisis. This study employs an approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative methodology is used to gather demographic data about study participants, a qualitative methodology is used since the goal of the study is to explore the range of opinions. The findings of this study ascertained that Christian leaders who demonstrated high levels of resilience were able to survive and, in some cases, thrive during the COVID-19 crisis. Leaders who demonstrated resilience and a positive outlook could increase the level of resilience in their followers, allowing them to survive the crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought attention to the necessity of situational analysis in dealing with and resolving a crisis. Conscious of the COVID-19 situation and guided by the contingency theory, Christian business leadership had to unlearn old habits and adjust to new ways of operating. This research is a new investigation into the ability of Christian business leaders to navigate through the turbulent times of COVID-19 so that their businesses and their followers can survive and prosper.

Off-Cycle and Off Center: Election Timing and Representation in Municipal Government

Who governs America’s cities: organized interests or mass publics? Though recent scholarship finds that local governments enact policies that align with citizens’ preferences, others argue that it is organized interests, not mass publics that are influential. To reconcile these perspectives, we show that election timing can help shed light on when voters or groups will be pivotal in city politics. Examining 1,600 large US cities, we find that off-cycle elections affect city policy responsiveness asymmetrically, weakening responsiveness on those issues where there is an active and organized interest whose policy objectives deviate from the preferences of the median resident. Here, we focus on public employees’ interests and find that local governments that are elected off cycle spend more on city workers than would be preferred by citizens in more conservative cities. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of interest groups and representation in local politics.

Electoral Institutions and Substantive Representation in Local Politics: The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting

While significant progress has been made in studies of substantive representation in local politics in the past decade, we know less about the effects of institutions on local representation. In this paper, I explore the effect of an increasingly popular electoral institution---ranked choice voting (RCV)---on substantive representation. I examine a host of fiscal variables and the ideology of city councils using generalized synthetic controls, and I find that the municipalities adopting RCV saw no changes in policy outcomes or representation. Finally, I use roll call data to show that the behavior of legislators who served both before and after the use of RCV was unchanged and that intra-city responsiveness remained constant after RCV was implemented as well. My findings suggest that ranked choice voting may not produce the significant effects on representation for which its proponents hope.

A gender-generation gap in political representation? The contingent impact of preference voting in Norwegian municipal elections

ABSTRACT The article analyses the impact of preference votes on the gender balance in municipal councils in Norway, and to what extent this impact varies with candidates’ age, party and local context. We compare actual representation with a hypothetical closed-list outcome. The analyses show that both local political representation and the impact of preference votes are characterised by a gender-generation gap. Older women are underrepresented, while young women are represented on equal terms with young men. Young female candidates benefit from preference voting in larger municipalities, whereas the older generation of women loses out in both large and small municipalities. In conclusion, we argue that an intersectionality approach should pay more attention to variables other than ethnicity, including age and local context. Moreover, research on gender and political representation should take into account a gender-generation perspective.

Mapping Inequalities in Local Political Representation: Evidence from Ohio School Boards

Elected representatives’ place of residence can reveal information about their socioeconomic status, their likely social networks, and potential biases in the constituencies they represent. Using data on home addresses we collected from local elections offices, we investigate the geographic distribution of school board candidates’, including winners’, places of residence across two election cycles for 610 school districts in Ohio. We employ geographic information systems (GIS) to identify census block group and school enrollment zones associated with each candidate’s residence. We document differences among block groups and schools with more and less school board representation, including a robust association between the relative affluence of a neighborhood and the likelihood of school board members residing in that area. We find that more citizens from affluent areas run for school board, and because a large proportion of school board elections feature minimal competition, these higher propensities to run explain disparities in representation.

Bilibid and beyond: Race, body size, and the native in early American colonial Philippines

The United States’ occupation of the Philippines began with proclamations of a new era of development and the prospect of local political representation. In coming to grips with what they saw as America's civilising mission, colonial scholars and officials sought information about the peoples of the Philippines by conducting a census and various population studies, using an array of methodologies drawn from criminology and physical anthropology. This article traces and critiques representations of the Philippine population in the 1903 Philippine Census as well as in several related studies published in the early American period, which served to reduce the Filipinos to a state of ‘otherness’ which served to justify colonial projects. Several of these racialised studies used the inmates of Bilibid Prison, both alive and dead, as experimental and documentary subjects to create a record of Filipino ‘sample types’ for various administrative and other purposes, such as the exhibition at the St Louis World's Fair of 1904. Bilibid prisoners’ body size, brain weight, skin colour, facial features and other physical attributes were selectively correlated with other colonial constructions of Filipino individuals and groups, such as ‘wildness’ and political maturity.

Opportunities and Challenges to Gender Quotas in Local Politics: The Case of Municipal Council Elections in South Korea

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the under-researched topic of women’s representation in local politics in Asia. Specifically, we investigate the kinds of opportunities and challenges regarding the issue of quotas, using the case of municipal council elections in Korea. Strongly enforced quotas in the proportional representation tier of the mixed electoral system have indeed worked favorably for women’s representation in local elections since the adoption of the quota law. Yet, we also note two distinct factors that challenge quotas at the local level in the country. First, party leaders initially agree to the idea of quotas to gain public recognition, but may lack commitment and show resistance when it comes to their actual implementation. Further, the general public consensus that favors reforms in order to bar party involvement in local politics as a way to achieve grassroots democracy, may place quotas at risk, as current laws require mandatory quota implementation in the parties’ candidate lists. We end our paper by highlighting the importance of grassroots democracy and that the key to achieve this goal is not only to guarantee transparency in the candidate nomination process, but also to ensure that parties commit to quota implementation.

Discussing women's representation in local politics in Turkey: The case of female mayorship

The purpose of this article is to explicate women's political representation in female mayorship in Turkey's local politics on the basis of the empirical data gathered from in-depth interviews with female mayors elected in 2004 and 2009 local elections. The objective is to construe women's representation in local politics with the concern that due to the “positional power” of a female mayor, women's representation in a municipality is not congenial to women's representation in the parliament. The contention of the article is that women's representation in female mayorship can be explicated by symbolic, accessible, and just representation.

The Price of Democracy? Political Representation Structure and Per Capita Expenditure in Victorian Local Government

Local government systems across the world face acute and ongoing fiscal challenges. In Australia, the regulatory response has focused squarely on council consolidation. This has, unfortunately, meant that comparatively little attention has been paid to alternate, less disruptive methods for enhancing municipal sustainability. One such possibility lies in modifying the structure of local political representation. We conduct a number of estimations on a four-year panel of Victorian municipal data to test whether the “law of 1/ n” has empirical support at the local government level. Our results clearly show that the number of geographically defined fragments, or wards, within a given municipality is a statistically significant determinant of local government expenditure. A number of public policy recommendations follow from the empirical evidence that might be broadly applicable to other municipal systems.

Local representation and strategic voting: Evidence from electoral boundary reforms

We analyze whether voters value local political representation by exploiting municipal mergers, which increase the number of candidates available to voters and intensify political competition. In the Finnish open-list proportional representation system, voters rank the candidates within parties, and thus, concentrating votes to local candidates increases the extent of local representation. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the vote distributions become more concentrated in municipalities less likely to gain local representation after the mergers. Moreover, the effect is much larger in municipalities where the benefits of local representation to voters are large. The latter result disentangles voters' responses from the responses of other political actors. The results are important also for designing local government mergers, which are an important policy tool in many countries. They highlight that concerns over deteriorating local democracy due to mergers have merit, because voters have preferences for local representation. At the same time, the vote concentration patterns we find alleviate these concerns.

PvsR: An Open Source Interface to Big Data on the American Political Sphere.

Digital data from the political sphere is abundant, omnipresent, and more and more directly accessible through the Internet. Project Vote Smart (PVS) is a prominent example of this big public data and covers various aspects of U.S. politics in astonishing detail. Despite the vast potential of PVS’ data for political science, economics, and sociology, it is hardly used in empirical research. The systematic compilation of semi-structured data can be complicated and time consuming as the data format is not designed for conventional scientific research. This paper presents a new tool that makes the data easily accessible to a broad scientific community. We provide the software called pvsR as an add-on to the R programming environment for statistical computing. This open source interface (OSI) serves as a direct link between a statistical analysis and the large PVS database. The free and open code is expected to substantially reduce the cost of research with PVS’ new big public data in a vast variety of possible applications. We discuss its advantages vis-à-vis traditional methods of data generation as well as already existing interfaces. The validity of the library is documented based on an illustration involving female representation in local politics. In addition, pvsR facilitates the replication of research with PVS data at low costs, including the pre-processing of data. Similar OSIs are recommended for other big public databases.

How the strategic context affects women's emergence and success in local legislative elections

While much scholarly attention has focused on the determinants of women's presence in state and national political offices, relatively little is known about women's descriptive representation at the local level. This study seeks to address the continuing gap in inquiry by examining where women run for and win seats on local legislative bodies throughout Louisiana. We develop hypotheses about the effects of the local strategic context on women's representation and expand on existing research by examining both place and county offices over a period of nearly three decades. Modeling candidate emergence and success endogenously, we find that more women run in localities where the strategic context is favorable to them and confirm that more women win when they have the resources necessary to propel their campaigns. The results suggest that the gender gap in local political representation can be lessened by building more robust networks of female leaders, enhancing partisan competition, and stimulating women in the electorate to support women's candidacies.

Womenns Representation in Local Politics: Evidence from the Philippines

Although at the beginning of the 21st century, over 95 percent of all countries in the world have granted women the right to vote and the right to stand for election (Ballington & Karam, 2005), gender equality in terms of representation in political structures remains to be a challenge around the world. This study seeks to determine the level of political representation of women at the level of the smallest unit of Philippine government—the village or barangay. Data comparison—within a span of 11 years—using the results of the July 15, 2002 and October 28, 2013 barangay elections, shows an increase of women’s representation in the 98 barangays of Zamboanga City, Philippines. After the 2013 barangay elections, the total number of female Barangay Captains increased to 14 compared to 8 in the 2002 election results. A total of 159 female Barangay Councilors were also elected in 2013, an increase of 14 percent compared to the 139 female councilors who won in the 2002 elections. The increasing number of elected female barangay officials in 2013 reached 173 women (22 percent) compared to 147 (19 percent) in 2002. In year 2013, a total of 147 women (18.75 percent) were elected as barangay officials out of 784 barangay positions throughout the city. The study concludes that women’s participation in politics at the barangay level is directly and inversely proportional to the representation of men in the same political structures. While existing laws and pertinent public policies promoting women’s equal representation with men in local politics and the efforts to improve the political landscape for women around the world, still the political structures, even at the smallest unit of the government, is a male-dominated arena.

Ethnic Identity, Informal Institutions, and the Failure to Elect Women in Indigenous Southern Mexico

This article argues that the low levels of descriptive representation of women in local political office in Mexico and Latin America is much more than a problem of the purported patriarchal cultures of indigenous and rural communities. We claim, based on a comprehensive survey of 466 municipal governments in the indigenous state of Oaxaca, that the underrepresentation of women is a function of institutions limiting female candidates. We test this “candidate supply” hypothesis, adapted from US-based studies, against the hypothesis that culture – as measured by indigenous ethnicity – has an independent effect on women's representation. We disconfirm that patriarchal, traditionalist cultures of indigenous communities cause underrepresentation in the election of women and instead find that a particular set of local institutions, which are more prevalent in indigenous municipalities, blocks the supply of potential women candidates. We conclude by considering the normative implications for women's representation in local politics in Mexico and Latin America.

Cibercultura:una forma contemporánea de comunicación multimedia

<p>Día tras día se consolida una perspectiva contemporánea de las construcciones de sociedad, cultura y conocimiento. La revolución de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) ha transformado de manera radical la visión de lo humano y su relación con el entorno, con sus congéneres y consigo mismo. La consolidación de enfoques culturales en la construcción de nuevas narrativas de lo global y lo local y en las representaciones políticas, económicas, sociales y territoriales de las sociedades permite hablar del fenómeno cibery, especialmente, de una novedosa manera de comunicación multimedia e interacción de nuestras sociedades. Este texto pretende aportar a la relexión de dicho fenómeno a partir del análisis de la cibercultura, en tanto escenario para entender la multiplicidad y multimedialidad del sujeto contemporáneo.</p>