Kommentare Zu Alfred Gusenbauer und Replik
Von Kurt Biedenkopf, John Gray, Janos Matyas, Kovacs Michael Mertes, Claus Offe
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Von Kurt Biedenkopf, John Gray, Janos Matyas, Kovacs Michael Mertes, Claus Offe
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The auxiliary units of Gdansk have become a permanent element of its structure. On the basis of the adopted legal measures, local authorities are not obliged to establish auxiliary units (but in Gdynia it is obligatory to appoint auxiliary units), but it follows from the grassroots activities of citizens. The mechanism of forming auxiliary units has become a means of inhabitants participating in municipal life. The unique functioning of the Gdańsk auxiliary units relies on their ongoing transformation, caused by multiple amendments of local laws. The above is a result of searching for the best solutions. Above all, multiple actions undertaken by the local government are focused on the stabilisation, as well as improvement of the functioning of auxiliary units.
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This paper seeks to present the changes in Poland’s territorial division and assess it at the local level (communes). The reference point is provided by the territorial reforms of other EU states, especially those with a three-tier structure, like in Poland. The basic thesis is that the territorial organization of public administration should change so as to keep up with political, economic, social and spatial processes, the latter bearing special importance for this. The paper concludes with recommendations for ways of changing local administrative structures, such as combining, or fusions of urban and rural communes.
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Since 2002, town mayors in Poland have been elected in direct elections every four years. In thirty towns with county rights the same persons were elected in the years 2002–2010. They are named ‘everlasting mayors’ (multi-term mayors, incumbents). In the 2014 local elections three of them resigned from the campaign for re-election, ten ‘everlasting mayors’ lost the elections and seventeen of them won the elections once again. Their successes provide the starting point for determining the position of political parties and nonpartisan committees on local political scenes. The assumption is made that the political position of parties is powerful if the ‘everlasting mayor’ is effective in trying to gain re-election while formally representing this party on the local political scene. And conversely – parties have a weaker political position on the local political scene when the incumbent prefers to lead a nonpartisan election committee in the rivalry for re-election (an electoral committee of voters, or an electoral com- mittee of a nongovernmental local organization). The nal conclusion of the analysis is the following: in the 2014 local elections in Poland most of the ‘multi-term mayors’ were re-elected as representatives of nonpartisan committees. Only in two cities (Gdańsk, Świnoujście) were mayors’ seats won by party political incumbents.
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Dayton Accords is the peace agreement reached on Nov. 21, 1995, i.e twenty years ago. During this period many scientific meetings were held in the world, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina too. The abstract of all these meetings could be the question if this international agreement’s good or not, whether it should be changed or upgraded, or neither of these things should be done. Without any doubts, Dayton Accords was historical moment not only for B&H, but also for its people and nations, because this agreement’s result was peace. Nevertheless, we didn’t get fair peace which meant equality of all its citizens and nations. It is all proved by the solution – one country, two entities, and three constitutional but not sovereign nations. Dissolution of B&H into two entities and disintegration of constitutional structure and agreement of two parties (Bosniaks and representatives of Yugoslav Federation) harming by this third party (Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina), brought the constant crisis of Bosnian and Herzegovinian society. This work brings few examples of violation of agreed obligations or secretly changed solutions by legislative power of B&H. All changes have been made mostly by harming Croatian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Experience has shown that all these changes damaged overall state of Bosnian and Herzegovinian society, and they didn’t bring prosperity for this country. Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to experience return to authenticity and necessary changes in order to create more equitable, more functional and cheaper union of three constitutional nations and its citizens.
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This article reviews the literature on relations between user charges and expenditures for local services, which allowed to formulate the expected directions of relations in order to conduct a research in a group of 65 cities. The study negatively verified the hypothesis of a negative relationship between revenues from user charges and expenditures on the services, both globally and for selected services.
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But the elections also brought an unexpected win for the opposition, which won two seats in parliamentary election for the first time in 20 years.
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Given the country’s electoral history, hardliner Mirziyaev seems a lock for the job, dampening the likelihood of change.
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Central African Republic (CAR) is one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world and has occupied the top place in all possible rankings of failed states, instability, poverty, corruption etc. for many years. However, although the CAR has experienced almost constant instability for the last few decades it was only in recent years that it has received the media attention which was unseen before. Such an unusual interest has resulted from two successive internal conflicts: first, in 2012 the anti‑ government rebellion drawing together the alliance of rebel militia factions, the Séléka, and a year later the insurrection of the opposing Anti‑Balaka forces. The article is an attempt to analyse the causes of the instability of the CAR and the current political and security situation in the country, taking into account, among other things, the results of the fieldwork conducted by the author in the Central African Republic, as well as his long‑time research on the phenomenon of dysfunctional states.
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The author discusses frequent practices of rendering the name of Bosnia and Herzegovina as ‘Bosnia’ as well as the uses of the term ‘Srpska’ in the public discourse. Leaving aside the cases of benign mental inertia, practices with certain political background are further analyzed. They are seen in the context of nationalist discourse and development of a ‘central narratives of national history’ for three Bosnian nations: Bosniakmuslims, Croats and Serbs. The paper also sheds light on the shifting strategies of the nationalist elites and the way those strategies are materialized in the production of public discourse on the past.
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This article analyses currency boards from the perspective of new institutionalism, namely historical institutionalism. New institutionalism holds the view that institutions have independent, autonomous effects on the social world. Once established, institutions tend to become stronger over time due to path dependency. At the same time, the new institutionalist literature has been criticized for either ignoring or not being able to properly account for institutional change. This article pays attention to both self-enforcing and self-undermining effects generated by currency boards. Furthermore, the interaction of the currency board regime with other national institutions is analysed. After laying out the theoretical arguments, this article empirically assesses them with the analysis of three cases of currency board regimes in Estonia, Lithuania, and Argentina. One of the findings is that currency boards tend to become more popular over time. This tendency can be explained by several self-enforcing effects related to growing indebtedness in foreign currencies, currency boards’ role in ensuring macroeconomic stability as well as emerging ideational consensus supporting the regime. However, currency boards also unleash self-undermining tendencies, primarily related to the increasing general indebtedness and deteriorating competitiveness. The relationship of currency boards with the broader institutional set-up proved to be important. Unlike in Lithuania and especially in Estonia, the national institutional landscape in Argentina was unfavourable for the existence of the currency board regime. This was especially evident during the economic downturn of 1998–2002 when Argentina attempted to implement the internal adjustment strategy in order to safeguard the currency board. Nevertheless, Argentina’s inability to quickly adopt a major fiscal consolidation package eventually led to the demise of the currency board regime. In turn, this inability can be attributed to the lack of informal norms of fiscal prudence, decentralized nature of Argentina’s political institutions, and the organization of interest groups. The analysis provided in this article thus suggests that, despite important self-enforcing effects of currency boards, they are not sufficient to bring about the major transformation of a generally unfavourable national institutional landscape.
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Research based on agenda mapping and an analysis of the changing priority issues of governments is a new trend in the field of public policy analysis. Systematic indicators and universal codebooks have been developed in order to compare issue attention longitudinally, across decision-making venues and between countries. However, despite the increased interest in the subject internationally, this field of study has been neglected in Lithuania – no systematic longitudinal analysis of the Lithuanian political agenda has been conducted so far. Therefore, this article aims to fill the gap by analysing changes of the legislative agenda of the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas). Data for the quantitative analysis was collected from the working programmes of 19 ordinary sessions of the Seimas between 2005 and 2015 and coded according to the Comparative Agendas Project’s Master Codebook. We sought to describe the general trends of the Parliament’s legislative agenda and to explain the main causes behind certain policy punctuations. We also analysed the EU’s influence on the Parliament’s agenda and the distribution of power between the legislative and the executive branches of power in formulating a list of priority legal acts. In order to answer these questions, six hypotheses were tested in our article. The results of our analysis revealed that the Lithuanian political agenda cannot be characterised as stable because a number of major agenda fluctuations occurred in the period between 2005 and 2015. Some of the policy punctuations coincided with elections as foreseen under the standard model, while other changes were disjoint and abrupt in line with the punctuated equilibrium theory. However, we observed incremental agenda changes in some, less politically sensitive, policy areas. Moreover, our research indicated the important role of external shocks – during the economic crisis political attention was allocated mostly to economy, taxes and public sector management, while the crisis in Ukraine increased focus on national defence issues. Finally, we found no evidence that the EU’s influence on the Lithuanian policy agenda is decreasing in the post-accession period. Taking the overload of the agenda of the Seimas into consideration, these punctuations reduce the ability of the legislature to adopt high quality legislation and to effectively solve public policy issues.
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In Poland, municipalities play a key role in pursuing the housing policy focused on satisfying the housing needs of the local community. The housing stock of a municipality was separated mainly to satisfy the housing needs of households which achieve a relatively low income and are not able to cope with this task alone. Therefore, a municipality should take all actions which promote the effective use of the existing housing stock. However, because of burdens arising from the transformation of the previous economic system, actions taken by municipalities in respect of housing are often not able to meet the needs of part of the local community. In the article the authors indicate the specificity of the problems in the field of housing policy of Krakow Municipality (KM) and the ensuing KM activity in the management of the owned housing stock in the view of the applicable law.
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A conversation with Hanna Hopko, EuroMaidan activist and member of Ukrainian parliament. Interviewer: Adam Reichardt
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A conversation with Peter Pomerantsev, London-based journalist and TV producer. Interviewer: Łukasz Wojtusik
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I often say that what happened in Polish-Ukrainian relations after the fall of the Berlin Wall was a geopolitical revolution. I compare it to the French and German reconciliation in the 1950s. While that laid the foundation for a new post-war Europe, a Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation creates the possibility of this construction extending further East. Moreover, the stakes in Polish-Ukrainian relations always were, and indeed continue to be, about more than just Poland and Ukraine.
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An interview with Yuri Dzhibladze, president of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow. Interviewer: Agnieszka Lichnerowicz
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Despair and dismay at the fading of the dreams of a post-1989 world.
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Did Putin threaten to castrate a journalist? And why it matters to get it right.
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The experience of reading the reports produced by various departments of the Lodz town government in the times of the Nazi occupation gives us a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the functioning of the fascist bureaucracy. There is much we can learn there about the work of the office in question and the lives of its officials in a broader context of the effectiveness of their activity. It transpires, for example, very clearly that no legal equality existed between the Germans and the Jews. This is corroborated by the fact that, in the rare cases of municipal claims against the Jews in the Lodz ghetto, those claims were upheld and enforced very meticulously.
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