Agenda-Setting With Local and National Issues

Three factors lead to the hypothesis that agenda-setting should be weaker at the local political level compared to the national level: (1) the more directly observable nature of local political problems, (2) the nature and strength of local interpersonal political communication networks, and (3) the relatively heavier media coverage of national political issues. This hypothesis was supported with data from respondents assigned at random to either local or national issue conditions and from a content analysis of television and newspaper coverage in Toledo, Ohio, of local and national issues. Contrary to the findings of certain previous studies, network television was found to exercise a stronger agenda-setting influence than newspapers at the national level. Newspapers, on the other hand, were the dominant agenda-setter at the local level. The relative agenda-setting influences of television versus newspapers are consistent with other data from this study concerning the relative strengths of the various media as sources of issue information.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67066/2/10.1177_009365027700400404.pd

Local political consolidation in Bangladesh: power, informality and patronage

During the past decade Bangladesh has shifted from a competitively clientelistic two‐party system towards a dominant‐party democracy. This article analyses how the ruling party has consolidated partisan political control at the local level. Using qualitative field data from 2004 and 2016, and drawing on a post‐structural analysis of the state, it shows how this extension of power has been achieved locally through interaction between formal and informal political initiatives. Four main types of informal activity are documented, through which the extent of local political competition has been reduced: circumvention, capture, brokerage and the creation of new organizations. These insights into the changing nature of Bangladesh's long‐standing partisan politics highlight how the state's capacity to deliver local services, allocate resources and maintain stability has been enhanced through the ruling party's control of local government structures, its elimination of political opposition, and its reshaping of local patronage arrangements

A narrative based model of differentiating rioters

The present study applied a narrative analysis upon rioter accounts of their motivations during the August 2011 England riots. To the authors’ knowledge, this piece of research was the first to utilise narrative theory to explore the phenomenon of Rioting. Narrative accounts of twenty rioters were compiled from media, online and published sources. Content analysis of the cases produced a set of 47 variables relating to offenders’ motivations given when describing their criminality. Data were subjected to Smallest Space Analysis (SSA), a non-metric multidimensional scaling procedure and results revealed four distinct themes: the Professional Rioter, the Revengeful Rioter, the Victim Rioter and the Adventurer Rioter in line with previous research conducted on differing crime types (Canter et al, 2003; Youngs and Canter, 2011). The four narrative themes are consistent with motivations identified in previous theories

Is American Public Administration Detached From Historical Context?: On the Nature of Time and the Need to Understand It in Government and Its Study

The study of public administration pays little attention to history. Most publications are focused on current problems (the present) and desired solutions (the future) and are concerned mainly with organizational structure (a substantive issue) and output targets (an aggregative issue that involves measures of both individual performance and organizational productivity/services). There is much less consideration of how public administration (i.e., organization, policy, the study, etc.) unfolds over time. History, and so administrative history, is regarded as a “past” that can be recorded for its own sake but has little relevance to contemporary challenges. This view of history is the product of a diminished and anemic sense of time, resulting from organizing the past as a series of events that inexorably lead up to the present in a linear fashion. To improve the understanding of government’s role and position in society, public administration scholarship needs to reacquaint itself with the nature of time.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline